Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles 9780567659385, 9780567655936

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To Anna O’Callaghan and Fr Denis, for dragging me kicking and screaming into a proper education

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are always many people to thank when writing the acknowledgements to a work such as this, and many of those who deserve thanks will have to remain nameless. All the people who have put up with my continual arguing, speculating, hypothesising and general tendency to behave like a dog with a bone when it comes to some minor academic issue have my gratitude, not least those at the British New Testament Conference that were unfortunate enough to venture an opinion on my thesis or any subject related to Acts; in particular, Sean Adams and Hannah Brooks (now Cocksworth), Professors Loveday Alexander, Andrew Lincoln and Max Turner, and Dr Helen Bond. Perhaps most kind of all has been Peter Doble, who nobody should ever be without. Professor David Parker, and in fact the whole ITSEE team, have also been patient, insightful and brilliant. Barbara Bordalejo has been a shrewd critic – her approval of my literary ideas was hard-won and sharpened them considerably. My supervisor, Dr Philip Burton, has done all the things a supervisor should and more. His willingness to grapple with my ideas and to make sense of what, even by his standards, was complicated stuff, is very much appreciated. My partner, Stephanie Adelaar, has been unbelievably supportive of my efforts to convert my PhD into a monograph, and has done enormous amounts of the tedious stuff, such as editing, indexing and formatting. She is also generally lovely.

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ABBREVIATIONS AB AJT CA CBR ClasBul HTR HZfAG JBL JR JSJ JSNT JT NICNT NLH NovT NovTSup NTS P&R SE SNTSMS TAPA TynBul WMANT WUNT

The Anchor Bible American Journal of Theology Classical Antiquity Currents in Biblical Research Classical Bulletin Harvard Theological Review Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte Journal of Biblical Literature Journal of Religion Journal for the Study of Judaism Journal for the Study of the New Testament Journal of Translation The New International Commentary on the New Testament New Literary History Novum Testamentum Supplements to Novum Testamentum New Testament Studies Philosophy & Rhetoric Studia Evangelica Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas Monograph Series Transactions of the American Philological Association Tyndale Bulletin Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament

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PREFACE This monograph brings to fruition a study that began in my very ¿rst year of university, during which I read English literature and Theology joint honours. Although in the end I switched to pursue theology alone, it was not before I had developed a pretty serious interest in literary theory – an interest that has never gone away, and has informed my study of the biblical text at every turn. In many ways, however, an interest as consuming as mine in the theory of literature owes its existence to an even longer standing interest in literature itself. I was ¿fteen when I read Mark’s Gospel – my ¿rst biblical text, but by this age I already had Shakespeare, Dickens, Homer, and many other great authors to draw upon. I found the Bible so interesting that I read the whole thing. Genesis fascinated me, Paul challenged me, Qoheleth amused me. It was all very edifying until I went to university. There, I found traditional, accepted interpretations of the Bible that beggared belief. I can honestly say I was amazed and dumbfounded by the Q hypothesis, JEDP, the subjective genitive and many other broadly accepted theories by which the biblical text was explained. I knew there was something wrong from the outset, but I had not yet the tools to do anything about it. Eight years later I am a little better equipped. A mad passion for Romans threw me into a frenzied search for practical and effective methodologies – and I never did quite stop looking. Beginning with the New Critics, structuralism and formalism, moving through the various post-structural methods and ¿nally to Bakhtin and Walsh, I found the resources I needed to understand what it was I wanted to do. It was only natural that when I began looking at the more narrative texts in the New Testament that I should apply these tools. Here, they became even more fruitful. However, the application of literary theory to biblical studies, or rather, the lack of it, has remained an ongoing problem during my time in academia. Many of the biblical texts remain fathomlessly mysterious, while a whole world of resources for their interpretation remains largely

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Preface

unexploited. The few who do make use, either by learning or instinct, of good literary methods, are not heard as often as they should be. This study is about bringing those methods to the fore in a pragmatic and productive way, increasing their appeal and use in the future. I am acutely aware that a monograph made up of more than ¿fty percent methodology can be a long and painful read. I wanted the proportion to be less, and experimented with different formats in order to achieve this, but ultimately I concluded that only a comprehensive and searching examination of the genre question was the best way to facilitate progress on Acts, or for that matter on any biblical text. I offer sincere apologies to readers who ¿nd it hard to work through, but also hope that I have managed to keep it interesting enough that those readers will be relatively few in number.

1

INTRODUCTION I. Orientation This study is the investigation of what makes Acts Acts. It is about generic expectations, intertexts, narrative frameworks. It is about the way Acts manipulated expectations and emotions to inform and entertain its earliest readers. Naturally, such a statement only triggers more questions: What do we know about the earliest readers or audiences? Were they a monolithic entity, or would they vary across physical and social space; and if they did, what strategies might appeal to each group? What might their expectations have been, and what did they think of as entertainment? But the methodological challenges were the greatest. From narrative to genre to historicity, it was apparent from the outset that the platform upon which I wanted to build was not theoretically sound. Most of the mainstream, accepted scholarship on Acts either engaged with literary theory in a way I found unsatisfactory, or worse, did not engage much at all. If I wanted to make serious inroads into reconstructing the earliest responses towards Acts, there was a lot more work to do than I had realised. At the same time, it was apparent that there was an urgent need to do it. Constructing a methodological framework appropriate to this task required the answering of two big initial questions. The ¿rst was to work out how anybody understands any text; the second, how a modern reader understands a modern text. These things being understood, the main question – how an ancient reader understood an ancient text – would be slightly less arduous. One concept above all has been useful – intertextuality. The last four decades or so have seen literary theorists make huge strides as a result of this concept, but biblical studies has not, in my opinion, made enough use of it. Although the term intertextuality has found its way into biblical studies very successfully,1 scholars have not generally engaged with it in 1. Among those to lay claim to the concept in recent years are Dale C. Allison, The Intertextual Jesus: Scripture in Q (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000); Richard B. Hays, Echoes of Scripture in the Letters of Paul (London: Yale

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles

all its theoretical rami¿cations. Though there are some notable exceptions,2 it seems that its most regular application is to references or strong allusions to the Old Testament in the New, allusions to one part of the New Testament in another, or other, similar ideas. Studies of this sort have no doubt been enhanced by their application of selected literarycritical ideas, but do not really extend beyond the boundaries of traditional historical-criticism. Such ideas are useful and productive, but are not taking full advantage of signi¿cant advances in literary theory. Even less productive are those studies (which I shall leave unnamed for the moment) that make uncritical use of literary methods, applying terminology as if it can make a hypothesis stand merely by its presence. Applied properly, intertextuality as a concept governs the attribution of meaning to the entire reading process.3 The allusions that biblical scholars so frequently and correctly notice are only a small part of its conceptual parameters – much more important is the accumulation of narrative structures that accrue with every single narrative we encounter, and their application to every subsequent narrative we read. If one applies an inappropriate set of intertexts to the narrative in hand they will not interpret it properly – this is of course the same as saying that if we read Hamlet as a romance (a relatively small mistake in the scheme of things), it becomes far less intelligible, and we will certainly fail to grasp signi¿cant portions of the meaning Shakespeare intended to University Press, 1989); Christopher A. Beetham, Echoes of Scripture in the Letter of Paul to the Colossians (Leiden: Brill, 2008); Kenneth Atkinson, An Intertextual Study of the Psalms of Solomon: Pseudepigrapha (Lampeter: Edwin Mellen, 2001); Kenneth Duncan Litwak, Echoes of Scripture in Luke–Acts: Telling the History of God’s People Intertextually (London: T&T Clark International, 2005). 2. A good overview is provided by Barbara Green, Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical Scholarship: An Introduction (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2000). See also L. Juliana M. Claassens, ‘Biblical Theology as Dialogue: Continuing the Conversation on Mikhail Bakhtin and Biblical Theology’, JBL 122, no. 1 (2003): pp.127–44. More recently, see Roland Boer, ed., Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007). 3. Obviously, this cannot be neatly summarised here – the ¿rst half of the present study explores it alongside other ideas, and the second half applies it to various parts of Acts. The best explanation of the concept comes from the horse’s mouth; M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (ed. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson; London: University of Texas Press, 1981). A shorter but very cogent explanation is provided by Jonathan Culler, ‘Presupposition and Intertextuality’, MLN 91, no. 6 (1976), pp.1380–96. One might also read Julia Kristeva, ‘Word, Dialogue, and Novel’, in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (ed. Leon S. Roudiez; trans. Thomas Gora and Alice Jardine; Oxford: Blackwell, 1981, pp.64– 91, though this is not light work. 1

Introduction

3

convey.4 Why? Because if the audience thinks it is watching a romance it focuses on relations between Hamlet and Ophelia and expects them to be the pivot around which the plot swings; ¿tting events into that framework means paying less attention – the wrong amount of attention – to the events leading up to Hamlet’s ultimate but doomed revenge on his father’s killer. The audience con¿gures the events wrongly because they have a narrative framework in mind which happens to be incorrect. Genre dictates expectations: no problem so far. But it is more complex than that. For there are elements of romance in Hamlet: a metatextual framework that exists within the tragedy and gives it depth. And there are historical stories, supernatural stories, stories about madness, about princes, about Denmark, England, castles, wine, and endless other things. It is not the way that these things behave in the real world that matters, but the way they have behaved in stories told before. It is the complex interplay of all these stories, the expectations they trigger, and the way those expectations are manipulated, that makes Hamlet the masterpiece it is – Hamlet is from start to ¿nish intertextual. Many of these intertexts are so faint that they could not realistically be called ‘sources’, or connected in any way that implies a mutual genre. But their presence inÀuences anyone watching or reading Hamlet. A sceptic might say that some proponents of intertextuality use it in a sense so attenuated that they probably should not bother, and I think there might be some justice in this. Intertextuality is more or less in¿nite, as texts and their links to other texts can be traced and chased forever, but only some of these connections can be meaningfully recovered and used to assist interpretation; the intertext, says the wise man, should be judged by its fruit. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that the intertextual parameters of any text are vast, and that reductionism is a pragmatic decision that enables interpretation rather than a theoretical one that excludes a text on other grounds. II. Outline of the Study Given the unusual number of dif¿cult and complex problems that affects the study of Acts, many of which are simply distractions in the context of this study, I begin Part I with a ‘Preliminaries’ chapter. This outlines the way I position myself in the academic debate, as well my stance on dating, textual issues, the problem of unity, the ‘we’ passages, sources, and the preface. By establishing a position on these from the outset, I hope to avoid complicating the rest of my thesis by having to tackle them 1

4. I will discuss intentionality in more thorough detail below, p.44.

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles

in the midst of the issues I actually want to deal with. I also tackle some terminological issues from literary theory more generally. Chapter 2 is a review of some of the most important or current genre proposals for Acts, illustrating also the methods used to make such proposals, and arguing that the preponderance of competing proposals under the current methodological framework is indicative of a problem. This clears the way to enter into a theoretical discussion of genre (Chapter 3) and narrative con¿guration (Chapter 4). Part I is the methodological meat of the study, and is sometimes tougher and chewier than I would like. I assure you I did my best to not overcook it. Having established a position on the key elements of Acts studies, and a methodological stance that is as clear and purposeful as possible, Part II offers a series of studies on the text of Acts itself. Between them, the three studies comprising Chapters 5, 6 and 7 illustrate most of the important aspects of the method. While I regret that these studies, which I like to call ‘the good bit’ (but you are free to disagree), occupy only half of the monograph, I also know that they would face insuperable opposition if I did not ¿rst demonstrate that they are methodologically viable. If anyone were to read these studies expecting to ¿nd an af¿liation with a single genre, or a ¿xed position on historical veracity, they would come away entirely confused. The methodology not only allows the studies to steer their way through what is a veritable mine¿eld, but also points scholarship in a direction that might generate more studies along the same lines. As to the studies themselves, the ¿rst (Chapter 5) shows how a device right at the beginning of the text con¿gures it through to the end, relying purely on narrative logic. I argue that the device (in Acts 1.6) would be detected by any ¿rst-century reader, but has become less important in modern story-telling and has remained unnoticed by biblical critics not expecting to ¿nd it. I place this study ¿rst because its focus on a speci¿c mechanism for narrative construction is, in my opinion, the easiest one to follow and therefore offers the best introduction to the ideas in question. The second study (Chapter 6) explores the con¿guration of Paul’s apostolic status, and shows how apparent discrepancies in the narrative actually indicate a subtle and intelligent narrative design by the author. This study is similar to the ¿rst in that it traces the construction of the narrative, but focuses on smaller clues spread over a larger number of verses. The third and ¿nal study (Chapter 7) explores some elements of comedy in Acts, in particular the Miletus speech. The application of intertextual frames to read the text makes it clear that the Miletus speech has more to say for itself than has often been assumed. This study takes a 1

Introduction

5

rather different tack to the previous two in that it looks at the construction of narrative on the micro-level of just one or two passages, and explores the ways in which Luke builds speci¿c scenes with particular intentions. Both macro- and micro-levels of narrative construction need to be better understood if we are to really get to grips with Acts (or any ancient text); while I am aware that tackling both in one monograph might be too ambitious, both small- and large-scale narrative issues have a similar methodology applied to them. The studies remain some distance ahead of us, however; in this introduction I want to survey some of the underlying problems that are addressed in the ¿rst half of the current work. This is because the issues addressed there are taken separately for reasons of clarity and brevity, but are actually highly interrelated. By discussing them brieÀy here, I aim to outline the problems from a more holistic perspective. I hope this will help the reader to follow the various strands as they are coming together. III. Historicity, Fiction and the Genre of Acts Perhaps the most immediate problem in scholarship on Acts is the question of its historicity, which underlies the majority of debates on its genre. In a 2006 article, Thomas E. Philips makes a helpful statement in his review of the genre question: Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, issues of historical accuracy and reliability dominated Acts scholarship. As early as the turn of the twentieth century, surveys of scholarship demonstrated that Acts scholarship was clearly divided into two traditions, a conservative (largely British) tradition which had great con¿dence in the historicity of Acts and a less conservative (largely German) tradition which had very little con¿dence in the historicity of Acts. Several subsequent surveys of scholarship have demonstrated that the same division continues within Acts scholarship to the present time.5

Philips is on to something when he notes this polarisation between those who place Acts in the genre of Hellenistic historiography in the mould of Thucydides and Polybius, and those who want to align Acts with a variety of non- or semi-historical genres. The number of scholars who support this former classi¿cation is impressive, and includes almost all of

5. Thomas E. Philips, ‘The Genre of Acts: Moving towards a Consensus?’, CBR 4, no. 3 (2006), p.365. 1

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles

the great scholars of the last century.6 Nonetheless, dissenting voices have appeared in the last few decades, and their inÀuence has been signi¿cant.7 The sustained pressure on the consensus of historicity is 6. Charles Kingsley Barrett, Luke the Historian in Recent Study (ed. Arthur S. Peake; London: Epworth, 1961); Hans Conzelmann, Acts of the Apostles (ed. Eldon Jay Epp and Christopher R. Matthews; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987); Christoph Heil, ‘Arius Didymus and Luke–Acts’, NovT 42, no. 4 (2000), pp.358–93; J. Rendel Harris, ‘Did Judas Really Commit Suicide?’, AJT 4, no. 3 (1900), pp.490–513; Duane Frederik Watson, ‘Epideictic Rhetoric of Farewell: Paul’s Speech to the Ephesian Elders’, in Persuasive Artistry: Studies in New Testament Rhetoric in Honor of George A. Kennedy (ed. Duane Frederick Watson; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1991); Gregory E. Sterling, Historiography and Self-de¿nition: Josephos, Luke–Acts, and Apologetic Historiography (NovTSup64; Leiden: Brill, 1992); Philip Schaff, History of the Apostolic Church with a General Introduction to Church History (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1854); Étienne Trocmé, Le livre des Actes et l’histoire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957); Clare K. Rothschild, Luke–Acts and the Rhetoric of History: An Investigation of Early Christian Historiography (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004); W. C. van Unnik, ‘Luke’s Second Book and the Rules of Hellenistic Historiography’, in Les Actes des Apotres: Traditions, rédaction, théologie (ed. Jacob Kremer; Journées bibliques de Louvain; Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1979); David L. Balch, ‘METABOLH POLITEWN – Jesus as Founder of the Church in Luke–Acts: Form and Function’, in Contextualizing Acts: Lukan Narrative and Greco-Roman Discourse (ed. Caroline Vander Stichele and Todd C. Penner; Symposium; Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), pp.139–88; Francis Watson, Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles: A Sociological Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Stanley E. Porter, Paul: Jew, Greek and Roman (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Adolf von Harnack, The Acts of the Apostles (ed. John Richard Wilkinson; London: Williams & Norgate, 1909); Ben Witherington, The Acts of the Apostles: A Socio-rhetorical Commentary (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1998); Ernst Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles: A Commentary (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971); Colin J. Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History (WUNT 49; Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1990); Henry Joel Cadbury, The Making of Luke–Acts (London: Macmillan, 1927). 7. Richard I. Pervo, Pro¿t with Delight: The Literary Genre of the Acts of the Apostles (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987); Richard I. Pervo, Acts: A Commentary (ed. Harold W. Attridge; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009); Loveday Alexander, Acts in its Ancient Literary Context (London: T&T Clark, 2005); Loveday Alexander, ‘The Preface to Acts and the Historians’, in History, Literature and Society in the Book of Acts (ed. Ben Witherington; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp.73– 103; Loveday Alexander, The Preface to Luke’s Gospel: Literary Convention and Social Context in Luke 1, 1-4 and Acts 1, 1 (SNTSMS 78; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Mikeal Carl Parsons, Acts (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008); Marianne Palmer-Bonz, The Past as Legacy: Luke–Acts and Ancient Epic (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000); Dennis Ronald MacDonald, Does the New Testament Imitate Homer? Four Cases from the Acts of the Apostles (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 1

Introduction

7

perhaps best seen in the conclusion to Philips’ article on the state of the question, which concludes on this note: Now, however, the question of Acts’ genre has come full circle and is again raising the question of historicity. Is Acts history or ¿ction? In the eyes of most scholars, it is history—but not the kind of history that precludes ¿ction. As Pervo has suggested, Acts is probably both ¿ction and history at the same time.8

The possibility raised here is that Acts blends ¿ctional and historical modes and is a blend of several genres; this invites questions of the whole idea of classi¿cation. A mixed designation that incorporates both history and ¿ction seems to satisfy neither group, and even were such a mixed genre to become a consensus, there is no methodological framework to make use of such a conclusion. So what is to gain from pursuing the question of genre? IV. The Problem of Classi¿cation The method by which scholars typically classify Acts involves delineating the features of a particular genre, demonstrating that Acts can also be described along such lines, and ¿nally placing the work within said genre.9 While this method is at least systematic, it leaves very little room for negotiation. For one thing, it requires a consensus that may never come; there are many competing claims and most of them have too much merit to be dismissed entirely. Even if a consensus could be reached, it would have to be one that prioritised one genre (or at a stretch, two or three genres) over all the others, minimising potentially useful parallels and actually hindering the investigation. Alternatively, scholars concede that there are no appropriate criteria by which to decide the ‘correct’ genre from the range of options, and give in to their perplexity, leaving any potential gains from genre theory unexplored. Either way, the methodology of cataloguing features and slotting a text into the most appropriate pigeonhole falls down in theory and in practice when the list of features does not match precisely, or worse, matches several genres equally well. Biblical scholars should not berate themselves too much for this methodological shortfall, however, the same problem has long troubled secular genre theorists. As recently as 2003 Hayden White is able to 8. Philips, ‘The Genre of Acts’, p.385. 9. Similar points are made by Christopher N. Mount, Pauline Christianity: Luke– Acts and the Legacy of Paul (NovTSup 104; Boston: Brill, 2002), pp.132–3. 1

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles

state: ‘no one has ever produced a compelling theory of genre in spite of the millennial effort to do so’.10 At about the same time, Mark Salber Philips claims that the conception of genres as a problem of taxonomy and classi¿cation is one that modern literary scholarship is moving beyond: Traditionally, of course, genres were thought of as ¿xed and autonomous ‘kinds’, and much of the effort of genre theory went into sorting these out into a variety of elaborate taxonomies – with predictably unsatisfactory results. Recent theories, however, have given less emphasis to classi¿catory rules and more to communicative possibilities. ‘Some have concluded’, writes Alistair Fowler, ‘that genre theory, being unhelpful in classi¿cation, is valueless. But in reality genre is much less of a pigeonhole than a pigeon, and genre theory has a different use altogether, being concerned with communication and interpretation’ (KL 37).11

While secular literary theory has struggled to move beyond the traditional model of genre classi¿cation, biblical scholars have only just begun to question it at all. Richard Burridge’s attempt to classify the gospels as biography remains one of the most impressive attempts by a biblical scholar to embrace genre theory,12 but ultimately resorts to being a nuanced and complex system of classi¿cation – precisely the sort of ‘elaborate taxonomy’ that Philips thinks unhelpful. The necessary leap from classi¿cation to an understanding of how genre enables communication is a big one, and it is not surprising that biblical scholars have largely failed to make it. Yet in my opinion, without this leap the question of genre is merely an academic cul-de-sac lacking any potential for improving our understanding of the text. The act of classi¿cation needs to be connected in a tangible way with the act of communication.13

10. Hayden White, ‘Anomalies of Genre: The Utility of Theory and History for the Study of Literary Genres’, NLH 34, no. 3 (2003), pp.597–8. See also Mary Depew, ‘Iambeion kaleitai nun: Genre, Occasion, and Imitation in Callimachus, frr. 191 and 203Pf.’, TAPA 122 (1992), p.313. 11. Mark Salber Phillips, ‘Histories, Micro- and Literary: Problems of Genre and Distance’, NLH 34, no. 2 (2003), p.412; Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p.37. 12. Richard A. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? A Comparison with GraecoRoman Biography (SNTS; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 13. It is dif¿cult to prove a negative, and my argument – that the current binary approach is unhelpful for interpretation – can only be proved by the lack of useful research done on account of it. I hope that by the end of the ¿rst half of this monograph the reader will be in a position to understand why I feel such an opinion is justi¿ed. 1

Introduction

9

V. The Rational of Classifying As will be seen in Chapter 2, by far the most common classi¿cation for Acts is as some sort of Hellenistic historiography. This puts Luke in the company of Polybius, Tacitus and Josephus, all of whose works appear at ¿rst sight to be very different from Acts. Typically, scholars that propose an historical genre state a limited number of shared criteria, including the preface, content, truth-claims, and ‘we’ passages.14 As is seen in the next chapter, the preface and ‘we’ passages are seriously contested, and it is dif¿cult to use them as evidence for the investigation, which is not huge cause for optimism about historical accuracy – Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, Philostratus’ Stories of Apollonius of Tyana or even Lucian’s The Passing of Peregrinus could all be said to make truthclaims and contain some ‘true’ content, and yet no modern scholar would simply assert their veracity. Of course, the act of classi¿cation is never entirely objective, and for many scholars there is an underlying desire to ‘prove’ the historical value of Acts that is absent from analysis of other ancient texts. Such a desire combines with an arti¿cially clear demarcation between history and ¿ction to force scholars down a binary route; forced to choose one or the other, many scholars are (in my opinion quite understandably) reluctant to classify Acts as ¿ction. Nonetheless, if considering Acts a ¿ction is a leap too far, a leap in the direction of Hellenistic historiography is a leap too far the other way. A binary opposition between the two is unhelpful and unproductive, either for classi¿cation, where neither designation has convinced, or in interpretation, where both approaches bear fruit, as we will see in the following chapters.

14. Perhaps the best and most comprehensive attempt is by Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History.

1



Chapter 1

PRELIMINARIES

This chapter aims to simplify matters for later in the study. After a brief explanation of where I locate myself in scholarship, the first half of this chapter covers key issues in the study of Acts, and extends beyond merely describing them and into the author’s stance on each subject. The second half looks at key terms of literary theory that the author uses throughout the present work, together with how they should be used. I. My Location in the Debate It is important to make clear from the outset that I am not a biblicalliterary critic: I am an historical critic with a literary toolbox. Useful and important as I consider literary criticism of the Bible to be, the present study has little do with feminist, masculinist, queer, post-colonial, Marxist, or any other theory of this sort. These are actually bodies of ideological theory that can be applied to literature in order to critique it, and are not of themselves theories about how literature operates in a technical sense. The Formalists and New Critics are in a sense my predecessors, but my own work is far removed from them, depending as it does heavily on Bakhtin’s work, which was to a large extent conceived as a critique of Russian Formalism.1 Closer still to my own theoretical approach are those scholars who have attempted to understand narrative

1. For a brief overview of Bakhtin’s role in the development of narrative theory, see Brian McHale, ‘Ghosts and Monsters: On the (Im)Possibility of Narrating the History of Narrative Theory’, in A Companion to Narrative Theory (ed. James Phelan and Peter Rabinowitz; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), pp.60–73. For a recent explanation (defence?) of the Formal/New Critical methods in Biblical Studies, see James Resseguie, ‘Formal/New Critical Interpretation’, in Dictionary of Biblical Criticism and Interpretation (ed. Stanley E. Porter; London: Routledge, 2007), pp.114–15.

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles

as a distinctive theoretical entity, such as Wayne Booth2 and Gerard Genette,3 but narrative theory is moving beyond these pioneers, and my work is no exception.4 My work is really a development of Mikhail Bakhtin’s, which was probably the single most effective critique of Russian Formalism, and by proxy, New Criticism;5 he is the most influential literary theorist of the modern age (an English translation only became available in 1981). While Bakhtin does not deal with genre classification in a sustained and cogent way, it is possible to work from his theory of the novel to a theory of genre without great difficulty – and that is really how I see my own methodology. Nonetheless, the work of genre theorists was also required in order for me to put this method together, including Alastair Fowler, Ireneusz Opacki and Jacques Derrida. All of these scholars do have ideological agendas, as any student of Bakhtin or Derrida will tell you, but it is their work on the way narratives function both individually and in dialogue with each other that is important for my own work. There are other bodies of theory too, of course, such as that which deals with the boundary between history and fiction,6 or with the cognitive process;7 everything that is capable of furthering our ability to understand what the author was attempting to communicate to his intended audience. In this I am joining a significant body of mainstream scholarship: the recent books Contextualizing Acts: Lukan Narrative and Greco-Roman Discourse and Jesus and the Heritage of Israel, are both collections of essays attempting to establish the context of Acts in its Graeco-Roman and Jewish contexts, and much of Loveday Alexander’s work could be considered as an attempt to establish how the narrative would have been understood by its ancient readers. The only real difference between myself and these scholars is that I explicitly tackle the theory in a way that is as comprehensive as possible. To my knowledge the only other biblical scholar 2. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (London: Penguin, 1983). 3. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). 4. One theorist who appears to have finally moved beyond the pioneering but ultimately limited models established by these influential figures is Richard Walsh. See for example, The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007), pp.82–5. 5. See for example, David Herman, ‘Histories of Narrative Theory (I): A Geneaology of Early Developments’, in Phelan and Rabinowitz, eds., A Companion to Narrative Theory, p.24. 6. Walsh, Rhetoric of Fictionality, pp.9–30. 7. See for example, Carol A. Newsom, ‘Spying Out the Land: A Report from Genology’, in Boer, ed., Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies, pp.19–30. 1

1. Preliminaries

15

that has attempted this in the field of genre is Richard Burridge.8 I have a lot of respect for Burridge’s work, which is bold and purposeful, but in my opinion it is not adequate to the needs of biblical scholarship.9 What I hope to construct here is a complex model that demonstrates something of how ancient readers interacted with genre to read the book of Acts, and to show how that might help us as modern critics trying to interpret the same text. II. Unity with Luke’s Gospel The unity of Luke–Acts has been a foundational aspect of the study of both books since Cadbury published The Making of Luke–Acts in 1927.10 Nowadays, the hyphenated name ‘Luke–Acts’ covers a variety of positions, but basically presupposes that Luke’s Gospel and the book of Acts are in some sense two parts of one unified work. The reasons that Cadbury’s hypothesis has caught on quite so well are obvious enough – it does make a lot of sense. One author, one continuous story, one theology (for the most part), and a huge number of parallels between the two texts combine to make it reasonable to consider the interpretation of one book dependent on and interrelated to the interpretation of the other. Robert Tannehill’s two volume commentary, The Narrative Unity of Luke–Acts,11 attempts to interpret the entire two-volume story as a coherent whole, and has enjoyed such success that it is now something of a standard text in Acts scholarship. On the whole, it is hard to disagree with the conclusion of Michael Bird’s recent literature review, that the majority position is definitely one of unity.12 The presumption of unity goes beyond authorial unity (though there are still a few scholars who doubt this)13 to an understanding of the 8. Burridge, What Are the Gospels? I am also aware that Sean A. Adams is in the process of publishing a monograph developing Burridge’s ideas: The Genre of Acts and Collected Biography. It should be available early in 2014. 9. See pp.85–6 of this study. 10. Cadbury, The Making of Luke–Acts. 11. Robert C. Tannehill, The Narrative Unity of Luke–Acts: A Literary Interpretation. Vol. 1, Luke (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990); The Narrative Unity of Luke–Acts: A Literary Interpretation. Vol. 2, The Acts of the Apostles (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994). 12. Michael F. Bird, ‘The Unity of Luke–Acts in Recent Discussion’, JSNT 29 (2007), p.426. 13. See for example, A. W. Argyle, ‘The Greek of Luke and Acts’, NTS 20 (1973), pp.441–5. One recent scholar to argue this point is Patricia Walters, The Assumed Authorial Unity of Luke and Acts: A Reassessment of the Evidence 1

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two-volume work as one continuous narrative. At the most emphatic end of the spectrum, it is assumed that the two works were divided simply because the length of a scroll made it inconvenient to do otherwise, and that the second ascension scene (which opens Acts) was added later in the history of transmission.14 At the suspicious end it is considered that despite some enlightening parallels they are essentially separate narratives.15 In between these poles are a range of opinions that vary from Gregory Sterling’s hypothesis that Luke had both volumes in mind from the outset but distributed them as separate entities,16 to Darryl D. Palmer’s and C. J. Hemer’s insistence on a difference ‘in type, even when we grant their essential unity and continuity’,17 to Martin Dibelius’ reservations about considering the two works as unified at all.18 Indeed, there are some significant problems with the assumption of unity. Parsons and Pervo’s monograph, Rethinking the Unity of Luke– Acts, points out a series of difficulties. In generic terms, it is not easy to reconcile Luke and Acts within one genre (this will be discussed below), in narrative terms, both volumes appear to have distinct beginnings, middles, and endings, and in theological terms, there are different emphases across the two works.19 Advocates of all positions run into problems. Aune, advocating generic unity, can no longer group Luke among the other Gospels. Tannehill also advocates unity, but finds he must use a different style of commentary for his volume on each of the two books. Those who oppose unity must account for the structural parallels analysed by Charles Talbert, and the prospective unity noted by Loveday Alexander.20 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). A survey of past hypotheses can be found in I. Howard Marshall, ‘Acts and the “Former Treatise” ’, in The Book of Acts in its Ancient Literary Setting (ed. Bruce W. Winter and Andrew D. Clarke; Carlisle: Paternoster, 1993), pp.165–6. 14. Palmer-Bonz, The Past as Legacy, pp.152–3. 15. F. Scott Spencer, ‘Acts and Modern Literary Approaches’, in Winter and Clarke, eds., The Book of Acts in its Ancient Literary Setting (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1993), pp.410–11; Mikeal Carl Parsons and Richard I. Pervo, Rethinking the Unity of Luke and Acts (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993). 16. Sterling, Historiography and Self-definition, p.336. 17. Darryl W. Palmer, ‘Acts and the Historical Monograph’, TynBul 43, no. 2 (1992), p.374; Hemer, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, p.33. 18. Martin Dibelius, Studies in the Acts of the Apostles (ed. H. Greeven; London: SCM, 1956), p.2. 19. Parsons and Pervo, Rethinking the Unity. 20. Charles H. Talbert, Literary Patterns, Theological Themes, and the Genre of Luke–Acts (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1974); Alexander, Acts in its Ancient Literary Context, pp.207–29. 1

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Important general considerations are worth noting. F. Scott Spencer does not deny unifying elements, but argues that each work can stand as a complete narrative, and that to treat them as one work is to lose some of the value of each.21 Critics of unity have made an argument from reception history – Luke and Acts have never been placed alongside one another in any known canon of the New Testament;22 this means that throughout history the books have rarely been read as one continuous narrative. Luke Timothy Johnson has argued against the validity of such evidence,23 while Markus Bockmuehl has weighed in for the other side.24 Without going over the entire argument, one must admit that both sides have a point. The unity of Luke–Acts may be widely held, and prima facie has much to commend it; but the questions highlighted above, about the genre and narrative structure of the supposed double entity, are significant, and it would be unwise to ignore them. One often notes that refutations of these concerns are not particularly attentive to literary theory. One might look at Palmer-Bonz, who explains the causes for all the differences between the two texts as if by doing so the differences are nullified.25 For example, she argues that differences in style are attributed to Luke’s need to incorporate sources in his Gospel but not in Acts:26 true, perhaps, but the difference remains, and one wonders whether a reader would make such conscious allowances for an author’s difficulties with the amalgamation of his materials. One might also turn also to Joel B. Green. He argues that Luke and Acts constitute a single narrative cycle in which Acts forms the realisation element of a cycle that moves from possibility to realisation to result. The latter half of Acts tackles this result more specifically, which is the increased ‘Jewish antagonism to the Christian movement’.27 Such a 21. F. Scott Spencer, Acts (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1997), p.15. 22. Andrew Gregory, ‘The Reception of Luke and Acts and the Unity of Luke– Acts’, JSNT 29 (2007), pp.459–72; C. Kavin Rowe, ‘History, Hermeneutics and the Unity of Luke–Acts’, JSNT 28 (2005), pp.131–57; Markus Bockmuehl, ‘Why Not Let Acts Be Acts? In Conversation with C. Kavin Rowe’, JSNT 28 (2005), pp.163– 6; C. Kavin Rowe, ‘Literary Unity and Reception History: Reading Luke–Acts as Luke and Acts’, JSNT 29 (2007), pp.449–57. 23. Luke Timothy Johnson, ‘Literary Criticism of Luke–Acts: Is ReceptionHistory Pertinent?’, JSNT 28 (2005), pp.159–62. 24. Bockmuehl, ‘Why Not Let Acts Be Acts?’ 25. Palmer-Bonz, The Past as Legacy, p.12 n.50. 26. Palmer-Bonz, The Past as Legacy, p.12 n.50. 27. Joel B. Green, The Gospel of Luke (NICNT; Grand Rapids; Cambridge: Eerdmans, 1997), pp.7–8. 1

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framework forces Acts into a smaller role than it wants to fulfil, as I demonstrate in the first two of the studies. Robert C. Tannehill resolves the problem of narrative unity by describing ‘narrative purpose’ in terms that might be better described as ‘theological purpose’.28 His terminology also confuses this ‘purpose’ with ‘story’ and ‘plot’, making three very distinct terms oddly synonymous.29 It is important to understand what is at stake in the issue of unity. If Luke and Acts are one book separated for some reason but otherwise a single work,30 the end of the entire work is Paul in Rome, and Jesus’ resurrection and ascension belong in the middle. If this is the case, one needs to read the two books together to make sense of the whole, and interpretation needs to proceed from this basis. Michael F. Bird argues that the decision ‘regarding the unity or disunity of Luke and Acts invariably affects how Luke’s overarching literary and theological purposes are understood’,31 and this in turn affects New Testament theology more widely, especially Gospel studies. If the two books are distinct entities, however, treating them as one book distorts the narrative flow of each, making both the end of Luke and the beginning of Acts the mid-point in a larger narrative scheme. Such a radical procedure should not be embarked upon lightly.32 Having said that, the only possible way to decide the question of unity is to continue to explore the texts both as independent units and as a single entity. The bigger concern is that the whole unity versus separate entities debate might be something of a cul-de-sac. In practice, neither pole is likely to be correct. If Luke–Acts is one entire volume, it would not be possible to read them as separate entities, but canonical history and the modern reading habits of Christians suggests that taking them separately 28. Tannehill, Narrative Unity, vol.1, pp.1–2. He reiterates this position in Robert C. Tannehill, ‘The Story of Israel within the Lukan Narrative’, in Jesus and the Heritage of Israel: Luke’s Narrative Claim Upon Israel’s Legacy (ed. David P. Moessner; Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1999), p.339. 29. There was considerable debate about the suitability of these terms, particularly from a deconstructionist perspective. See for example: Jacques Derrida, ‘Living On – Border Lines’, in Deconstruction and Criticism (ed. Harold Bloom; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), p.94; Jonathan D. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge, 1981), pp.170–2; Jerome S. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp.17–21. 30. As a matter of ‘physical expediency’; Green, The Gospel of Luke, p.8. 31. Bird, ‘Unity in Recent Discussion’, p.441. 32. In this I am in significant agreement with Spencer, Acts, p.15. 1

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works. Assuming, then, that they can be read as distinct entities, Acts is at least a sequel to the gospel that relies heavily on characters and religious ideologies put forward in the ‘first word’, and which alludes to and draws parallels with its narrative. Sterling’s conception of Luke creating the frame for the overall work, completing the Gospel and distributing it while he works on Acts, has Luke writing two distinct works that have each other fully in mind from the outset.33 While I am unwilling to speculate on historical circumstances in this way, I think Sterling offers an interesting compromise here, which allows for a strong intentional unity of significant interpretative value while preserving the integrity of the two individual narratives. One common but difficult assumption is that the demonstration of unity at some locations in the narrative is proof of unity at all points. Loveday Alexander, one of the very finest scholars on Acts, falls down here. Having made a strong case for prospective unity dictating at least one major aspect of Acts, she admits to having been ‘converted to unity’.34 The presupposition underlying her conclusion is that a clear answer exists, and merely lacks evidence; it is my opinion that such a supposition is fundamentally erroneous: no clear position exists, in either the available evidence, or even the mind of the author himself. The basic structures of a number of stories might well exist in any author’s mind as he composes one of them, and if those stories are related, there is every reason for the author to have some sort of macrostructure, and even some elements of microstructure, in place before he starts writing at all. Such a literary conception might be entirely arbitrary, so that at one point there might be an absolutely concrete idea of how the two works are connected, while at another there is only a vague retrospective concern for unifying the two. The extent to which Luke had Acts in mind when he began his gospel is impossible to ascertain; strong points of contact coexist with discrepancies, problems, differences in style. Though the unity of the books is often very strong, if they were originally one work and the dividing factor merely the size of a scroll, Luke has inadvertently found for his stopping point a scene that looks rather like a narrative climax. The second ascension scene (unless it can be proven as an interpolation – on which point see Chapter 5) does not exactly recapitulate the first, and it also looks suspiciously like Luke has changed style at this ‘midpoint’ to such an extent that scholars would like to place the first half in one genre category and the second in

1

33. Sterling, Historiography and Self-definition, pp.331–9. 34. Alexander, Acts in its Ancient Literary Context, p.223.

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another. Absolute ideas about unity, whether for or against, may hamper interpretation. This is roughly what Bird concludes, before asking the question at the heart of the matter: Scholars need to be conscious of the fact that many of the purposes proposed for Luke–Acts are contingent on a prior assumption of literary and theological unity. If that assumption is either stripped away or undermined, then the apparent purpose or thematic cohesion of Luke–Acts becomes open to question (cf. Rowe 2005: 147-48). Likewise, to argue that the Gospel and Acts were composed for two completely different reasons can become equally artificial if it can be effectively shown that the volumes do exhibit an intentional form of unity on some horizon or other. This creates a methodological conundrum as to whether or not one should start with an affirmation of unity and then pursue the purpose of Luke–Acts, or pursue the purpose(s) of Luke and Acts without any prior commitment to unity.35

Bird’s methodological conundrum is serious enough to dictate my approach: any presupposition about the relationship of the two volumes is more likely to hinder than help. Positing interpolations to account for the second ascension scene is one of many ways in which an assumption of unity might prove problematic, and ignoring the parallels that run across Luke–Acts, working themselves out most fully in Paul’s and Jesus’ parallel journeys and trials, would serve our understanding no better. In the present study I assume that the two narratives are distinct entities with several types of unity between them. Such a position simply accepts that it is impossible to know in advance whether a given passage is better interpreted as part of Luke–Acts or simply Acts. However, my own research focuses on Acts rather than Luke–Acts, so I make reference to the Gospel only when I find it advantageous to my interpretation of Acts. III. Preface The preface to Acts has long been considered key to several other important issues, ensuring hotly contested debate on the topic. In essence, however, this debate can be boiled down to two questions: 1. Does the preface to Luke’s Gospel cover Luke–Acts, or just Luke? 2. Is the preface a genre-indicator? 35. Bird, ‘Unity in Recent Discussion’, p.441, citing Rowe, ‘History, Hermeneutics and the Unity of Luke–Acts’. 1

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These are the essential questions and are obviously pertinent to the present study. Addressing them, however, is difficult. The questions are not separable in any practical sense, because as has been seen above, unity and genre are themselves intertwined. What is more, if the preface to Luke’s Gospel is taken as applying to Acts, the available data from which to establish what Luke has explicitly stated in regard to his purpose and historical credentials are significantly increased. The question is not as to whether the Acts preface refers back to the Gospel; that much is undisputed: ġÅ ÄòÅ ÈÉľÌÇÅ ÂĠºÇÅ ëÈÇÀ¾ÊÚľŠȼÉĖ ÈÚÅÌÑÅ, ķ ¼ĠÎÀ¼, ĻÅ ôÉƸÌÇ ĝ `¾ÊÇıË ÈÇÀ¼ėŠ̼ Á¸Ė »À»ÚÊÁ¼ÀÅ (Acts 1.1). The difficulty lies in establishing whether Luke’s Gospel refers forward to Acts. Such prospective unity at such an early stage in the composition of the Gospel would firmly connect the two works and allow key historiographical terms from the Lukan preface to be applied also to the Acts narrative. These include: ÒŸÌÚÊÊÇĸÀ (I arrange in order), ¸ĤÌĠÈÌ¾Ë (eyewitness), ÒÁÉÀ¹ľË (accurately/truthfully) and Á¸¿¼ÆýË (successively/point by point). Obviously, given the desire to establish the veracity of the biblical text, these are important terms.36 The arguments are long and complex, made only more difficult by these problems regarding the prologue in Luke’s Gospel.37 Luckily, they can be summarised with extreme brevity: we cannot be certain if Luke intends to cover Acts with the Gospel preface. Loveday Alexander is quite correct when she says: ‘These verses contain no explicit indication that a second volume is in sight: it is only with hindsight, after reaching the beginning of Acts, that the reader is encouraged to explore the connection’.38 The reader of Acts is supposed to be able to refer back to Luke’s Gospel, but that Gospel preface may not have been written with Acts in mind. Thus, while it is worth bearing the Gospel itself in mind when interpreting Acts, it goes beyond the evidence to use the Gospel preface as if it covers Acts. In this study, only the latter preface will be used: ġÅ ÄòÅ ÈÉľÌÇÅ ÂĠºÇÅ ëÈÇÀ¾ÊÚľŠȼÉĖ ÈÚÅÌÑÅ, ķ ¼ĠÎÀ¼, ĻÅ ôÉƸÌÇ ĝ `¾ÊÇıË ÈÇÀ¼ėŠ̼ Á¸Ė »À»ÚÊÁ¼ÀÅ, 2 ÓÏÉÀ úË ÷ÄñÉ¸Ë ëÅ̼ÀÂÚļÅÇË ÌÇėË ÒÈÇÊÌĠÂÇÀË »ÀÛ ÈżįĸÌÇË ÖºĕÇÍ ÇĪË ëƼÂñƸÌÇ ÒżÂûÄο¾. 3 ÇđË Á¸Ė 36. One suspects that the importance for conservative scholars of applying these terms to Acts is what makes Porter rather uncritically attack Pervo for minimising the ‘historical preface’ of Acts, when clearly, the truth-claims made are all in Luke’s Gospel. See Porter, The Paul of Acts, p.16. 37. A wide-ranging recent discussion can be found in Moessner, ed., Jesus and the Heritage of Israel, pp.9–126. 38. Alexander, ‘Preface to Acts’, p.77. 1

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles ȸÉñÊ̾ʼŠî¸ÍÌġÅ ½ľÅ̸ ļÌÛ Ìġ ȸ¿¼ėÅ ¸ĤÌġÅ ëÅ ÈÇÂÂÇėË Ì¼ÁľÉĕÇÀË, »ÀЏ ÷Ä¼ÉľÅ Ì¼ÊʼÉÚÁÇÅ̸ ĚÈ̸ÅĠļÅÇË ¸ĤÌÇėË Á¸Ė ÂñºÑÅ ÌÛ È¼ÉĖ ÌýË ¹¸ÊÀ¼ĕ¸Ë ÌÇı ¿¼Çı· 4 Á¸Ė ÊÍŸÂÀ½ĠļÅÇË È¸Éûºº¼À¼Š¸ĤÌÇėË ÒÈġ d¼ÉÇÊÇÂįÄÑÅ Äü ÏÑÉĕ½¼Ê¿¸À ÒÂÂÛ È¼ÉÀÄñżÀÅ ÌüÅ ëȸºº¼Âĕ¸Å ÌÇı ȸÌÉġË ùÅ óÁÇįʸÌñ ÄÇÍ. (Acts 1.1-4)

It is not abundantly clear where the preface ends, but certainly no later than the middle of v.4, where Jesus’ speech appears to shift from reported to direct. Thus the properties of the Acts prologue are, according to Alexander, the use of the authorial first person, a dedication, and a brief recapitulation of the previous volume. According to her assessment there are no prefaces in any other extant text that look like it – if it was once indicative of a genre, there is currently no way to know which one. However, Alexander concludes: ‘the preface to Acts, taken on its own, does not set up expectations for the informed reader that the text which follows belongs to the genre “Hellenistic Historiography” ’.39 Though the preface is still put forward by some as evidence of historicity, her work has never been seriously challenged. So, what can be said about the preface? In the introduction to the second part of this monograph the way the preface connects with the first chapter of Acts is considered in more detail. At this stage, there is only a little to be gleaned from it – however, that little is actually quite important. The preface, in my opinion, may not make a generic claim, but it does make truth-claims of a real and serious sort, and this needs to be respected if Acts is to be understood (though even Richard Pervo, whose classification of Acts diverges more than any other from the consensus of historiography, would not dispute its application to history in some sense). At the outset of the narrative, Luke claims that Jesus’ resurrection and subsequent appearances are historical facts: ȸÉñÊ̾ʼŠî¸ÍÌġÅ ½ľÅ̸ ļÌÛ Ìġ ȸ¿¼ėÅ ¸ĤÌġÅ ëÅ ÈÇÂÂÇėË Ì¼ÁľÉĕÇÀË. There is no sign of irony or fiction here, and whether or not these truth-claims are genrebound they do help to define the expectations of the reader. Samuel Byrskog, discussing the ‘we’ passages, argues that scholars who focus on narrative and literary elements of Acts fail to appreciate that the literary and narrative rhetoric is essentially persuasive precisely as a rhetoric that makes visible its diachronic elements, as the author seems to indicate in the prologue of the Gospel.40

39. Alexander, ‘Preface to Acts’, p.100. 40. Samuel Byrskog, ‘History or Story in Acts – a Middle Way? The “We” Passages, Historical Intertexture, and Oral History’, in Vander Stichele and Penner, eds., Contextualizing Acts, p.260. 1

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This is a valuable point, and could be applied equally to the Acts preface. Whether such claims are empty rhetoric or pious testimony is a different matter, of course, but from the perspective of authorial intentionality, a relationship to real-world events is integral to the communicative strategy and therefore essential to the proper interpretation of Acts.41 IV. ‘We’ Passages The infamous passages of Acts in which the narration shifts from third person singular to first person plural occupy approximately 12% of the whole. Scholars dispute where they begin and end, creating more or fewer passages of smaller or greater size, but all locate them as occurring somewhere within 16.10-17; 20.5–21.18 and 27.1–28.16.42 The most conservative hypotheses suggest that they are reports from an eyewitness, most likely Luke the beloved physician of Col. 4.14, 2 Tim. 4.11 and Phlm. 1.24,43 while at the other end of the spectrum scholars suppose that it is a literary device familiar to sailing narratives and most visible in the Epic.44 William Sanger Campbell has recently divided the proposals made by scholars to account for the passages into four categories: x The author used the first person because he was an eyewitness to those events (author-as-eyewitness). x The author used the first person because his source was an eyewitness to those events (source-as-eyewitness).

41. This is discussed at some length by Matthew L. Skinner, Locating Paul: Places of Custody as Narrative Settings in Acts 21–28,10-18 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003). See also Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p.10. 42. William Sanger Campbell, ‘The Narrator as “He”, “Me”, and “We”: Grammatical Person in Ancient Histories and in the Acts of the Apostles’, JBL 129, no. 2 (2010), p.385; Stanley E. Porter, The Paul of Acts: Essays in Literary Criticism, Rhetoric, and Theology (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), pp.28–33. 43. F. F. Bruce, The Acts of the Apostles: The Greek text (London: Tyndale, 1952), pp.2–6; Charles Kingsley Barrett, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Acts of the Apostles (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994), pp.xxvii–xxx. 44. There are a range of hypotheses supporting a non-historical/fictional ‘We’. Eckhard Plümacher, ‘Wirklichkeitserfahrung und Geschichtsschreibung bei Lukas. Erwägungen zu den Wir-Stücken der Apostelgeschichte’, ZNW 68, no. 1/2 (1977), pp.2–22, is quite close to Robbins; Bruno Bauer, Die Apostelgeschichte: eine Ausgleichung des Paulinismus und des Judenthums innerhalb der christlichen Kirche (Berlin: Hempel, 1850), thinks Luke invented most of the content. 1

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x x

The author used the first person because he wished to create the impression that either he or a source was present at those events (fictional eye witness). The author used the first person because literary convention demanded he do so (conventional eyewitness).45

Although the first two options are by far the most popular, they present certain difficulties that have proved intractable. These include the contradiction between the author’s withholding his identity for most of the narrative only to reveal it here, and the lack of clear entrance onto, or exit from, the relevant passages, by any character who might conceivably be the narrator. Campbell has shown that neither Thucydides, Polybius nor Josephus use the first person in the same way or with the same effect, and this casts doubt on the idea that Luke’s use of the first person equates to some kind of historical veracity.46 As Susan Marie Praeder argues: First person comments are not the same as first person narration. First person commentary is the role of ancient historians at the time of narration, the ‘I’ or ‘we’ who evaluate sources, inform readers of this or that point, state personal opinions, and the like. First person narration refers to the roles of ancient historians as prior participants in the narrated events. First person comments prepare for the sometimes sudden introduction of ancient historians as first person singular and plural participants. In cases of third person participation, first person comments distinguish authorial observations at the time of narration from prior activities and experiences of the authors-to-be. In Acts there is no preparation for the sudden introduction of the first person plural participants. The only first person singular and plural comments are in the prologues in Lk. 1:1-4 and Acts 1:1. These comments come too seldom and too soon in Luke–Acts to prepare for the first person passages. The author of Acts is not identified as a prior third person participant, and there are no authorial observations outside the prologues.47

Her point is that the normal conventions of Hellenistic historiography, which allow the reader to makes sense of the passages from the norms of that genre, are simply not present in this regard. However, if the two historical options have proven unsatisfactory, the rhetorical options have fared little better. Vernon K. Robbins, the main proponent of the rhetorical approach, fails to find convincing parallels in contemporary 45. Campbell, ‘ “He”, “Me”, and “We” ’, p.386. 46. Campbell, ‘ “He”, “Me”, and “We” ’. 47. Susan Marie Praeder, ‘The Problem of First Person Narration in Acts’, NovT 29 (1987), pp.208–9.

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literature,48 which makes the category of ‘conventional eyewitness’ unlikely. ‘Fictional eyewitness’ is either poor historical rhetoric or a variant of ‘conventional eyewitness’, and in either case works no better than the other options. If Luke the physician, or indeed anybody, was in attendance for the events covered by the ‘we’ passages, the innocuous nature of this narrator’s entry and exit do very little to explain the logistics of this, sometimes giving the impression that somebody was present one moment and absent the next. The same problem exists if this is a rhetorical device – one would still expect an attempt at veracity to account for this problem, and parallels from clearly fictional accounts (such as those cited by Robbins) clearly demarcate in a way that Acts does not.49 It is possible that the narrator made use of a source but integrated it poorly into his story. It would be odd, however, to assume that Luke, whose style is consistent and artful for much of his two narratives, would fail to integrate properly one source at several points, while assimilating other sources so well that they are undetectable.50 Samuel Byrskog observes that whether historically accurate or not, the sort of information typically contained within the ‘we’ passages adds realism to the narrative, ‘strengthens the diachronic dimension in the story and presents a conceptual bridge between the now of the narrator and the then of Paul’.51 This presents the possibility that the very arbitrariness of the ‘we’ sections is rhetorically functional and serves a definite purpose that scholarship has not yet discovered – it cannot simply be asserted that such a device demonstrates a source. This study makes use on several occasions of passages from within a ‘we’ section, making it necessary to outline a stance, if only to anticipate objections. However, given the intractable nature of these problems and the fact that none of the studies in this monograph depend upon reaching a conclusion one way or the other, the question will not be pursued any further in this project.

48. Vernon K. Robbins, ‘By Land and By Sea: The We-Passages and Ancient Sea Voyages’, in Perspectives on Luke–Acts (ed. Charles H. Talbert; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1978), pp.215–42. 49. E.g. Od. 9.39-41; Aeneid 3.1-9. 50. Some scholars are more confident. Stanley E. Porter has ‘reconstructed’ the original ‘We’ document. See The Paul of Acts, pp.42–6. 51. Byrskog, ‘History or Story?’, p.263; Tannehill, Narrative Unity, vol.2, pp.246–7. 1

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V. Dating The dating of Acts is complex, and inextricably tied to several other problems. If the unity of Luke–Acts were absolute, the dating of the two would probably be close, suggesting an early date for Acts. Likewise, if the ‘we’ passages represent the eyewitness account of Luke the physician, this would also delimit the date to the first century. The source question plays a similar role. If, as Haenchen, Walton and others have supposed, Acts is ignorant of the letters of Paul,52 this suggests an early date, since a collection of epistles appears to have been in circulation by 100 CE,53 and it is unlikely (though by no means impossible) that Luke was in total ignorance of an extant collection. On the other hand, if Pervo is correct in arguing that Acts is dependent on the letters and on Josephus, the date can be no earlier than the last decade of the first century, and could be later. The latest possible date comes when Iraneus clearly cites Acts sometime between 175 and 200 CE; the earliest possible date is the last event of the book, which is Paul’s arrival in Rome, at around 61–63 CE.54 Usually, scholars posit a date closer to the earliest than the latest possible option; something Vernon K. Robbins argues is not primarily driven by the evidence: The scholarly consensus is much closer to Robinsons’s [early date] than Knox’s [late date], since a date of 62 CE is less than two decades earlier than 80 CE, while 150 CE is seven decades later. This means that the general scholarly consensus is an ‘early dating’ based on a desire to have the canonical form of Luke and Acts produced during the first century, as soon after the Gospel of Mark (and for some, after the Gospel of Mathew) as appears to be feasible.55

Speculating as to the reason for this desire, he suggests:

52. Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles, pp.81–90; Steve Walton, Leadership and Lifestyle: The Portrait of Paul in the Miletus Speech and 1 Thessalonians (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp.12–33, gives a good overview of the situation. His entire monograph represents an argument against the epistles as a source for the Miletus speech, and by proxy for the whole of Acts. 53. Richard I. Pervo, Dating Acts: Between the Evangelists and the Apologists (Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 2006), pp.57–8. 54. Vernon K. Robbins, ‘A Socio-Rhetorical Look at the Work of John Knox on Luke–Acts’, in Cadbury, Knox, and Talbert: American Contributions to the Study of Acts (ed. Mikeal Carl Parsons and Joseph B. Tyson; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), p.93. 55. Robbins, ‘John Knox on Luke–Acts’, p.93.

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If we ask why the earlier date for Luke–Acts is more attractive to a majority of people, the reason appears to lie in a double principle: (a) Luke and Acts are documents in the sacred canon of the Christian community, and (b) it is considered best for a canonical document to have been written as close to the origins of Christianity as possible.56

I tend to agree with Robbins here: there is a tendency in scholarship to favour an early date, and in the absence of clear evidence either way, scholars have steered closer to the earliest than the latest possible date. That situation may now be changing. Richard Pervo has recently produced a monograph looking in great detail at the possible date of Acts, and has opted for a late date. His detailed analysis argues that while it is impossible to be certain, all probabilities point to a date of somewhere around 115 CE. Joseph B. Tyson supports Pervo’s conclusions, saying: In my judgement he has presented a substantial argument for dating it in the period 100–130 CE. Although the consensus dating of Acts in ca. 85 CE has long held, few scholars have been willing to lay out convincing arguments either for this date or for a meaningful context for its composition.57

My own research appears to support a late date, but I do not want the present work to stand or fall on that hypothesis. Of the three separate studies that comprise this project, only one (comedy and character) depends in any way on dating, arguing as it does that the letters are a source. However, this study makes its own case rather than being dependent on other hypotheses. The second study (Paul as apostle) could also be seen as making a claim to the letters as source, but could also theoretically reflect the real-life issues that are recorded in the letters. These studies, then, should be taken as contributing to the debates over both dating and sources. Sources are a wider issue, however, and must be tackled separately. VI. Sources The sources from which the text in its present form was derived is a perennially favourite question of biblical scholars, who have traditionally been interested at least as much in the historical events behind the text as 56. Robbins, ‘John Knox on Luke–Acts’, p.92. 57. Joseph B. Tyson, ‘Wrestling with and for Paul: Efforts to Obtain Pauline Support by Marcion and the Author of Acts’, in Contemporary Studies in Acts (ed. Thomas E. Philips; Macon: Mercer University Press, 2009), p.14. 1

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they are in the text itself. In this school of thought, if the text can be divided into several component parts, these earlier documents can be dated to a period closer to real events. The closer to real events the source might be, the more likely it is to be accurate. In many respects this is the same approach as has traditionally been applied to other historical texts, and yet scholarship in other disciplines has moved forward considerably in the last few decades, leaving biblical scholarship trailing behind.58 It is certainly true that the study of Acts has shifted its general emphasis away from source criticism – recent commentaries such as those by Pervo and Parsons show that no longer is the sole focus on dividing Acts up into smaller pieces.59 However, it is remarkable just how frequently sources are cited as the reason for problems scholars have with understanding the text (the present work will show many examples of the practice). In the opinion of this author, however, the practice is in line for a review. What follows is perhaps only a brief outline of the situation, but one that demonstrates a variety of confusions and difficulties that scholarship is faced with as a consequence of this legacy. As is the case with many biblical texts, the debate over the possible sources of Acts is a complex one with a long history. Even having dealt separately with the ‘we’ passages, it is impossible to give a full description of the various hypotheses. In this small section it is only necessary to give a brief overview of the situation as it has developed over the last century. a. The Sources of Acts Both Luke’s Gospel and the Septuagint represent known sources of a kind that need not be discussed at any length here, simply because they are not contested. Other possible sources from extant literature are the Pauline epistles and Josephus’ Antiquities. Theoretical documents abound, several of which will be discussed in this section. The question of whether the Pauline epistles are a source has divided scholarship for some time. Despite many points of contact, the fact remains that not only does Acts not directly cite a Pauline epistle, but worse, the depiction of Paul in Acts clashes with Paul’s self-portrait in the epistles. It is for this reason that John Knox has long disputed the tendency of scholars to give Acts and the letters equal weighting when

58. For a discussion of the trend in the classics, see Tim Duff, Plutarch’s Lives: Exploring Virtue and Vice (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), pp.5–9. 59. Pervo, Acts; Parsons, Acts. Both commentaries are excellent.

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reconstructing Paul’s life and mission.60 Conzelmann admits that it is ‘almost inconceivable that the author of Acts knew nothing at all about the letters’, but asks: ‘did he purposely ignore them?’61 He understands the points of crossover as dependent upon ‘traditions in the Pauline churches’.62 Haenchen goes further, taking it for granted that Luke knew nothing at all about the letters. Ultimately this conclusion is borne of Luke not presenting a portrait of Paul consistent with the epistles.63 Recently, Richard Pervo has presented a comprehensive list of contact points between Acts and the letters, making a solid case for seeing them as a source. His argument is simple – probability suggests that the letters are a source, but scholarship is uneasy about assuming Acts is supported by the letters because: ‘if [Paul] did know them, his standing as a historian lies open to censure’.64 When it comes to Josephus, Conzelmann is agnostic,65 while Haenchen makes no mention of him as a potential source.66 However, dependence on Josephus was once in fashion, and there is plenty of evidence in favour of that hypothesis.67 Once again, Pervo has brought this evidence together and shown its strength.68 Luke may or may not take information from Josephus and the letters, but there is no clear basis for excluding either source. These two – Josephus and the letters – represent extant texts that can be analysed. When it comes to sources that are not extant, proving their existence is itself a significant problem. There is broad agreement that Luke, especially in Acts, reworks his sources to the point of undetectability. Dibelius, for example, says:

60. See for example, John Knox, ‘A Conjecture as to the Original Status of II Corinthians and II Thessalonians in the Pauline Corpus’, JBL 55, no. 2 (1936), pp.145–53; ‘“Fourteen Years Later”: A Note on the Pauline Chronology’, JR 16, no. 3 (1936), pp.341–9; ‘The Pauline Chronology’, JBL 58, no. 1 (1939), pp.15–29; Chapters in a Life of Paul (London: A. & C. Black, 1954); ‘A Note on the Format of the Pauline Corpus’, HTR 50, no. 4 (1957), pp.311–14. 61. Conzelmann, Acts, p.xxxiii. 62. Conzelmann, Acts, p.xxxiii. 63. Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles, pp.89, 113. 64. Pervo, Dating Acts, p.52. 65. Conzelmann, Acts, p.xxxiii. 66. Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles, pp.81–3. 67. Joseph Klausner, From Jesus to Paul (London: Allen & Unwin, n.d.); Max Krenkel, Josephus und Lucas: der schriftstellerische Einfluss des judischen Geschichtschreibers auf den Christlichen (Leipzig: H. Hassel, 1894). 68. Pervo, Dating Acts, pp.149–99. 1

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles [In the gospel] it was a case of framing and piecing together fragments of tradition… If however we read in Acts the scenes of the Apostolic Counsel or of the trial, we become easily convinced that here Luke has not only fitted together, joined, and framed fragments of tradition, as in a mosaic, but that in Acts there is a greater depth of original composition. It is worth establishing what proportion of the whole work is taken up by these literary endeavours; until this is done, we must consider as hopeless every attempt to divide entirely into different sources the text of Acts.69

Scholars old and new agree with this point of view, including Mattill, Pervo, Byrskog, Palmer-Bonz and Penner.70 Conzelmann, however, remains undeterred: But the relative unity of style does not prove that no sources have been used. In the Gospel of Luke we may observe in a controlled setting the way in which the author reworks the language of his sources. The question is: did Luke use rather extensive sources which offered a connected historical account, or did he rely on individual traditions…71

One can plainly see here the absolute presupposition of sources; an enthusiasm which naturally affects the way the text is read, with the critic looking at stylistic variation not as a literarily functional device, but a failure in an assumed ideal stylistic unity. Deviation from such unity is an error, and potential evidence of a seam that joins two originally disparate documents. Haenchen, like Conzelmann, admits that ‘no sources can be inferred in Acts by stylistic criteria’.72 Yet like Conzelmann, he is prepared to discuss the ‘Antiochene Source’ at some length.73 This source had long been posited by Wendt, Jeremias and others,74 and is still cited by Pervo in his 2009 commentary.75 To demonstrate the validity of the ‘Antiochene Source’, Haenchen claims the insertion of Saul’s approving oversight into the martyrdom of Stephen, and shows how Luke has ‘dovetailed the 69. Dibelius, Studies in the Acts of the Apostles, p.2. 70. A. J. Mattill, ‘The Value of Acts as a Source for the Study of Paul’, in Talbert, ed., Perspectives on Luke–Acts, p.84; Pervo, Acts, p.50; Byrskog, ‘History or Story?’, p.259; Palmer-Bonz, The Past as Legacy, p.96; Todd C. Penner, ‘Contextualizing Acts’, in Vander Stichele and Penner, eds., Contextualizing Acts, p.71. 71. Conzelmann, Acts, p.xxxviii. 72. Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles, p.81. 73. Conzelmann, Acts, p.xxxvii; Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles, pp.88–9. 74. Joachim Jeremias, ‘Untersuchungen zum quellenproblem der Apostelgeschichte’, ZNW 36 (1937), pp.205–21; Hans Hinrich Wendt, Die Apostelgeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1913), pp.21–40. 75. Pervo, Acts, pp.13–15. 1

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story of Stephen with his next item of tradition: the account current among the communities of Paul’s conversion before Damascus’. This assertion is largely drawn from the fact that Saul is not involved in the actual martyrdom, but merely ‘inserted’ at the end of the scene.76 The problems with this are manifold. First, it supposes that at least one of these two sources is written, and that Luke followed it in a certain way – restricted so severely as to be unable to make Saul a chief persecutor, but sufficiently unrestricted to slot him in easily. Second, the positing of these two ‘traditions’ as formative to the text suggests or assumes a cut-and-paste exercise, rather than earnestly searching out the manner in which they are used to produce a unified narrative entity. Thirdly, and of most immediate importance, is the lack of respect for the aesthetic value of this ‘insertion’. The ominous introduction of Paul at this point would have been quite a moment for the target reader; here is the hero of the early Gentile church, making his first appearance, and it is one that comes at a critical moment in the persecution of the first Christians. This dramatic introduction emphasises Paul’s villainy. The only assumption one needs to make to see the aesthetic value in introducing Paul in this way is that literary artistry matters to Luke. b. Literary Artistry and the Negative Search for Coherence Looking through the text and into history is an important objective in biblical studies, which has always had to engage with the issue of biblical veracity at least as much as meaning.77 Q, for example, is considered the earliest Gospel, and receives much attention despite the fact that it is not extant and may never have existed.78 In this model of scholarship texts themselves are artefacts in an historical search – their value is bound up with their ability to shed light on the Christ-event and the early Christian community. It is in the interests of the historical critic to reach back to the earliest available documents, and this motivates him to search for fissures in the text that may reveal an exciting insight into an earlier period. Methodologically, however, this is a cause for concern. At the most basic level, I want to ask if it is possible to search a text for incoherence;79 how does one embark upon a search for it?

76. Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles, p.83. 77. John A. Darr, Herod the Fox: Audience Criticism and Lukan Characterization (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998), pp.13–14. 78. Mark S. Goodacre, The Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem (London: SCM, 2001), pp.1–6. 79. Darr, Herod the Fox, p.14. 1

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The structure of any work of literature is likely to be highly complex, with some elements that do not make immediate sense having their coherence validated later in the text. An emphasis on finding seams in such a text fails to respect this complex coherence, and serves only to discourage scholars from fully exploring how what appears incoherent or inconsistent at one point can be relevant later. The same could be said of elements that might have been intelligible to an audience familiar with the appropriate context but are less than clear to a later reader. These and other difficulties mean that an enthusiasm for finding sources could also mean a lack of application regarding the interpretation a text that might just stand as a coherent whole. In his 1964 book, The Sources of Acts, Jacques Dupont illustrates this problem. He is positive about the existence of sources but is forced to admit the difficulty of finding any. Looking over source theories from the decades preceding his work, he finds some pretty clear flaws with everyone of them. Exploring Harnack’s hypothesis that Acts 2 and 5.1742 could be seen as embellishment of the same source that is used in 3.1– 5.16. Harnack’s evidence for this is the repetition of key themes and even features, Dupont is dubious. First he summarises Harnack’s evidence: In Harnack’s system, each of the two sources begins with the account of a miracle – in the one case the miracle of Pentecost (2.1-13), in the other, that of the cure of the lame man (3.1-10); this analogy is certainly very vague and it is difficult to see how it can form the basis of a parallelism in the proper sense of the term. After the miracle follows a great missionary discourse by Peter (2.14-36; 3.11-26). The relationship between these two passages is unmistakable.80

But Dupont observes obvious difficulties here: We cannot, however, ignore the fact that Peter’s missionary discourses all have a certain resemblance; this makes it necessary to extend the the parallelism to the discourses of ch. 4, 5 and 10. Further, it is with the inaugural discourse of Paul (ch. 13) that the discourse of Pentecost has the deepest affinity. Thus we do not merely find ourselves in the presence of two, but of six parallel discourses.81

Dupont goes on to observe that the only real evidence for parallelism is in the double arrest of the apostles and their two appearances before the Sanhedrin, but here again the leap to a source is far from inevitable:

80. Jacques Dupont, The Sources of Acts: The Present Position (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1964), p.42. 81. Dupont, The Sources of Acts, p.42.

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J. Jeremias showed in 1937 that there was a continuity between these two narratives; far from being a repetition, they complete each other. To realize this it must be remembered that the Jewish law only allowed a breach of the law to be punished if the culprit were aware of the consequences of his act. In practice, immediate prosecutions could only be made against those who had done their Rabbinical studies; in the case of ordinary people, they first had to be given a legal admonition…82

In this example it is recourse to social and legal convention that offers a competing explanation of events, and if it is true, the source-based explanation offered by Harnack actually hinders the reconstruction of the history behind the narrative. Had Harnack been more thorough in attempting to establish the coherence of the text he may have discovered Jeremias’ solution for himself, and the perceived fissure would have in fact been a clue to the interpretation of the narrative rather than a red herring in the search for the original sources. It would seem then that source-critical methods have always had an unacknowledged basis in narrative coherence, the establishing of which is the object of much literary theory, and narrative theory in particular. The view that literary theory is largely unhelpful to the traditional historical-critical objectives is neatly highlighted by the work of a literary-minded scholar, Marianne Palmer-Bonz: In contrast to proponents of historical criticism, who seek to understand a text by fixing its location within a particular historical, social, and cultural grid, and by understanding its organic development from earlier sources, literary critics focus on various elements of the text as a narrative and formal unity. Thus, for the majority of New Testament interpreters, who view Luke–Acts as one extended text, such a compositional approach should be enthusiastically welcomed as a useful balance to the more analytical methods of historical criticism.83

It is not my intention to belittle this statement by Palmer-Bonz, which has much merit in its attempt to show literary criticism’s value for exegesis. It contains, however, at least two misconceptions, which seem to me to be the result of a confusion between biblical literary criticism and the application of secular literary theory to biblical texts. First, a literary theorist does in fact attempt to fix a text within a ‘particular historical, social, and cultural grid’; if he did not, he would not be able to read the text at all – knowledge of all of these things is essential to any reading of any text (though the truth or accuracy with which the author reports history is a different matter). Burridge’s

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82. Dupont, The Sources of Acts, p.44. 83. Palmer-Bonz, The Past as Legacy, p.9.

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argument in What Are the Gospels? amounts to a claim that ancient audiences would have been able to understand the Gospels as ancient biographies – it is largely an argument from modern genre theory. Meir Sternberg critiques traditional biblical criticism from the standpoint of narrative coherence, and observes that if one has to know something of the language and idiom of a text to interpret it, surely knowledge of cultural morality is useful for similar reasons.84 The only thing a literary theorist does not want to focus on is its ‘organic development from earlier sources’, and even this, insofar as it aids interpretation, is potentially useful.85 This is because if there is a real distinction between the historical and literary critic, it is that the latter subordinates known elements such as social, political and economic factors to the primary goal of making sense of the text as a whole, while the historical critic also subordinates the text into the primary goal of getting at the history and real events behind its creation. It is therefore not a shift, as Ernst Haenchen supposes, into ‘literary embellishment’ which is ‘in no sense rigorously demonstrable’,86 but away from hypothetical documents and into real ones, with a corresponding methodological development in order to accomplish this. Palmer-Bonz is also erroneous in her supposition that focusing on the ‘various elements of the text as a narrative and formal unity’ contrasts with the source-critical method; I argued above that source theories are based upon supposed failures in coherence, placing source and narrative theories on a very similar methodological footing. Source-critics are merely quicker to find a failure in the coherence of a text and happier to posit a solution that, if it were correct, would help achieve their particular objective of discovering earlier documents and shedding light on primitive Christianity. As I have already tried to say, literary criticism of the Bible, important as it is, is not, and should not be taken as, the only use of literary theory that can be important to biblical scholarship. Biblical literary critics use literary theory to achieve certain goals, such as challenging the ideologies behind biblical texts and their interpretations by later readers. But literary theory is more than ideological, it is also technical: genre and narrative theory do not primarily function as tools of critique, but as tools of analysis. A further and perhaps more disquieting misconception in PalmerBonz’s statement, however, is that the methods of historical-criticism are ‘more analytical’. The difference between historical-critical theory and

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84. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, pp.7–22. 85. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, p.13. 86. Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles, p.88.

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literary theory does not lie in analytical depth, but in the complexity of results – literary theory is, after all, analysing a very large body of texts, and looking at such intricate elements as intertextual allusions, symbolism, and generic mutation. Such things are difficult to measure and quantify in any precise way. Historical criticism on the other hand, frequently attempts to find singular purposes and objectives. A move into literary theory inevitably produces unsatisfactorily complex results, from which the extrapolation of clear or simple answers is almost impossible. Given such complexity, it would be better to remain with the more traditional methods: the problem is that literary theory tends to prove them wrong. c. MacDonald’s Intertextually Founded Coherence in Acts 10.1–11.18 Another example of a dubious source theory is Peter’s vision in Acts 10.1–11.18, in which the Lord tells him not to regard ‘anything profane that I have made clean’. This is paralleled by an angelic visitation to Cornelius, who is then commanded to send for Peter. This double divine intervention results in the first Gentile conversion, and leads into the second half of the narrative and the worldwide evangelical mission. The trouble with the story is that it is not obvious how the vision, in which animals are declared clean, and which appears to relate to Jewish regulations, relates to the ritual purity of Gentiles. This problem has caused several influential scholars to put forward the idea of two sources87 – one which pertains to Cornelius and Gentile purity, and one about a vision to Peter originally relating to dietary regulations. Conzelmann goes so far as to say, ‘The original intention of the vision does not conform to Luke’s use of it’. ‘Literary seams’, he informs us ‘are visible’. But reading further reveals that the ‘Lucan insertion’ is proven merely by the presumption of the Petran vision – which means that the vision remains the basis of the problem.88 MacDonald demonstrates that the problem of most commentators revolves around the unnatural interpretation of the vision, which most obviously relates to animals, in terms of people. He then painstakingly demonstrates that in the Iliad, the Odyssey and many subsequent imitators, events are depicted in which the behaviour of animals is interpreted as an oracle. He also demonstrates that the vision accompanied by a corroborating dream (another problem for interpreters of Acts is the 87. Dibelius, Studies in the Acts of the Apostles, pp.109–22; Conzelmann, Acts, p.80; Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Acts of the Apostles (AB, 31; New York: Doubleday, 1998), p.448. 88. Conzelmann, Acts, pp.80, 82.

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redundancy of the double-vision) is a common arrangement, before discussing the literary pedigree of the various incidents that comprise the episode, and several points in the text (such as placing Peter by a harbour, as is the case with Agamemnon in Iliad book 2), that suggest Homeric imitation.89 It is not necessary here to argue MacDonald’s case at any length; the simple fact that a Homeric text, which was a key piece of literature in the ancient world, offers a clear parallel and potential alternative to an influential view, demonstrates the importance of exploring intertextual solutions before resorting to source-criticism. The vision + dream combination, and the use of animal behaviour as oracular indication, are not uncommon or unusual in ancient Greek literature; a fact that undercuts the basic premises of source-critical approaches to this passage. d. Modern Approaches to the Source Question Richard Pervo represents perhaps the most literary end of Acts commentaries, and published only recently, in 2009. One would therefore expect, and often finds, a more reserved application of source hypotheses. Indeed, his opening statement under the subheading ‘Sources’ plainly posits not only the Pauline Epistles, but also Josephus.90 His bold statement that ‘either Luke knew of the letters but declined to consult them or he made such use of them as suited his needs and purposes’91 demonstrates this move away from sources as the primary issue in the analysis of a text. Nonetheless, Pervo posits a form of the Antiochene Source, which he calls the ‘Gentile mission source’. This hypothetical document ‘served as a description and justification of the gentile mission’:92 […it was] not anti-Pauline in the sense of the Pseudo-Clementines (or even of Matthew), but it took care to note that Paul began as a subordinate of Barnabas in Antioch, and that Barnabas took the side of Peter in a conflict at Antioch.93

Pervo’s reasoning is again based upon coherence – an Antiochene mission without apostolic guidance conflicts with the Lukan ideology present elsewhere in the text, and must therefore be an interpolation. Traces can be found in 2.1-13, which explains events at Pentecost and

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89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

MacDonald, Does Acts Imitate Homer?, pp.19–65. Pervo, Acts, p.12. Pervo, Acts, p.12. Pervo, Acts, p.13. Pervo, Acts, p.13.

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Peter’s subsequent speech. Further investigation shows that it is dissatisfaction with the sense of the passage that prompts Pervo’s assertion of a source for this episode: Pentecost may be the most exciting and the least comprehensible episode in Acts. The story collapses at the slightest breeze. A redactional solution almost leaps from the page: Luke had a story about ecstatic speech that he transformed, either out of distaste for glossolalia or to expound universalism, or both, into a linguistic miracle focusing on what was heard.94

Here again, Acts is perceived to fail the coherence test; I would say unfairly. Chapter 5 will argue that point.95 e. Coherence as the Acid Test Sources, particularly non-extant sources, are hypothesised principally from a perceived failure in the coherence of the text – demonstrating that coherence underlies historical-critical approaches just as much as it does any literary method. Whether it is parts of Genesis that appear incompatible with others, or Luke’s gospel being inexplicable without positing a non-extant source, the way the text fits together and works as a unit is almost always a pillar of source hypotheses. Biblical criticism unconsciously assumes coherence as a basic premise at every turn. The notorious ‘subjective genitive’ debate in Pauline studies is founded on the idea that the traditional objective genitive reading is incoherent,96 while careful argumentation attempts to demonstrate that for each key phrase, one reading of the genitive is more coherent than the other. All this with continual glances in the direction of theological (or from a literary perspective, thematic) coherence. So when analysing source theories from the perspective of literary coherence, 94. Pervo, Acts, pp.59–60. 95. See Chapter 6, below. 96. Richard B. Hays, The Faith of Jesus Christ: An Investigation of the Narrative Substructure of Galatians 3:1–4:11 (SBLDS 56; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983); Douglas A. Campbell, ‘Romans 1:17 – A Crux Interpretum for the ÈţÊÌÀË ÉÀÊÌÇı Debate’, JBL 113, no. 2 (1994), pp.265–85; Douglas A. Campbell, ‘Pistis and Nomos in Paul: A Linguistic and Structural Perspective’, JBL 111, no. 1 (1992), pp.91–103; James D. G. Dunn, ‘Once More, Pistis Cristou’, in The Faith of Jesus Christ (ed. Richard B. Hays; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 2nd edn, 2002), pp.249–71; C. E. B. Cranfield, ‘On the ÈţÊÌÀË ÉÀÊÌÇı Question’, in On Romans (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1998), pp.81–98; Roy A. Harrisville, ‘Before PISTIS CRISTOU: The Objective Genitive as Good Greek’, NovT 36, no. 3 (2006), pp.233–41; Barry Matlock, ‘The Rhetoric of ÈţÊÌÀË in Paul: Gal. 2.16, 3.22, Romans 3.22, and Philippians 3.9’, JSNT 30 (2007), pp.173–203. 1

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the literary theorist is not breaking the established rules of historicalcriticism but emphasising the importance of a tacitly agreed principle. She merely refuses to split the text into component parts unless she has first employed every possible tool for exploring the unity of a text as it stands, which means that while in terms of the actual pragmatics of interpretation they can be poles apart, in terms of methodological premises the separation between historical-critical, particularly sourcecritical approaches, and literary ones, is actually minimal – both rely on the basic premise that a text should be make sense as it stands: it should be coherent. It is true that in recent years scholarship has become less focused on source-criticism, but the situation is not simply one of fashion. Pervo, as we saw above, still relies upon it in 2009, while Haenchen rails against it in 1965. As he complains at one point in his commentary: …these results are the more significant for being those of scholars in eager quest of historical results, scholars for whom the discrimination of sources represented their most valuable tool. The inadequacy of their method can be unusually well illustrated from the beginning of the passage. With 13.1 Luke begins a new scene sharply divided from the preceding one. Those who believe Luke’s method was the assembly of fragments from different sources will thus be inclined to conjecture the beginning of a new source.97

Marianne Palmer-Bonz has expressed concerns more recently: Since the identification of Luke’s sources must depend on indirect criteria such as style, word usage, or variations and contradictions in conceptuality and theological viewpoint, judgements are highly subjective and appear to be contingent upon the specific preconceptions of the individual interpreter.98

These remarks express reservations about source hypotheses that have little to do with her preference for a literary-minded approach. The need to readdress the traditional methods does not result from an act of usurpation by the now fashionable literary theory, but from the realisation that its own results are always potentially flawed. In this sense, literary theory provides a way of resolving some of the difficulties that have dogged historical criticism. As Loveday Alexander notes with customary tact: ‘The more we can make unified sense of the narrative as it stands, the less need we have to resort to source-criticism’.99

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97. Haenchen, The Acts of the Apostles, p.401. 98. Palmer-Bonz, The Past as Legacy, p.96. 99. Alexander, Acts in its Ancient Literary Context, p.224.

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VII. Textual Problems It is well known that Acts has an unusual and problematic textual history; consequently, it is only necessary to summarise the situation very briefly before outlining my own position. In justifying my position I hope to avoid having to explain my stance later in the study. Traditional scholarship maintains that there are two distinct traditions for the transmission of the text of Acts. Nestle-Aland along with most Western scholarship favours the ‘Old Uncial’ version, and sees the ‘Western Text’ or ‘D-Text’ best represented by Codex Bezae as a late editorial expansion that made various emendations for a variety of reasons. Recent textual scholarship has confirmed support for the ‘Old Uncial’ by casting doubt on the whole idea of a polarised textual tradition. The work of Boismard and Lamouille suggests that the D-Text may not represent a ‘single tradition or type’.100 Since that time, Codex Oxyrynchus (P127) has provided fertile ground for that suspicion. Georg Gäbel argues that a comparison of Oxyrynchus and Codex Bezae illustrates that both came from a common ancestor but were significantly amended.101 This hypothesis gains support from David Parker, whose An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts and Their Texts suggests that the D-Text was more the result of a process than a single redaction.102 His latest publication on Codex Oxyrhynchus offers more support for this view.103 Instead, Parker understands the form of Acts to have been continually treated with liberality by editors and/or scribes: in support of this he cites Read-Heimerdinger’s argument that narrative tends to suffer more variation than dialogue in transmission.104

100. M. E. Boismard and A. Lamouille, Le texte occidental des actes des aptôres reconstitution et réhabilitation (Paris: Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1984). The observation comes from Pervo, Acts, p.3. 101. Georg Gäbel, ‘The Text of P127 (P.Oxy. 4968) and its Relationship with the Text of Codex Bezae’, NovT 53 (2011), pp.107–52. 102. David Parker, An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts and their Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p.298. 103. David Parker, ‘Acta Apostolorum (Papyrus 4968)’, in The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol.74 (ed. P. Parsons et al.; London: Egypt Exploration for the British Academy, 2009), pp.1–20. 104. Parker, An Introduction to the New Testament Manuscripts, p.299; Jenny Read-Heimerdinger, The Bezan Text of Acts: A Contribution of Discourse Analysis to Textual Criticism (JSNTSup 236; London: Sheffield Academic, 2002), pp.17–19. 1

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The arguments against the traditional view of a polarised textual transmission from which one must be preferred seem to me to be substantial enough to defer the entire issue. In this work the Nestle-Aland version of Acts is always preferred. VIII. Terminology Literary theory is a complex arena that divides into several large fields. Within biblical literary criticism and secular theory, for example, we cannot expect to find uniform use of technical terminology. Consequently, to avoid confusion later in the study, I wish to clarify some terms at this point. a. Author/Implied Author The term ‘implied author’, coined by Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961,105 was originally part of an ongoing theoretical debate about the nature of intentionality. Booth argued that the author present in the text is a rhetorical construct rather than a real person, who could only be known to the extent that he wishes to be.106 This concept of implied author has remained with literary theory ever since, though many have challenged it, including Gerard Genette,107 and more recently and comprehensively, Richard Walsh.108 Booth’s recent defence of the concept actually brings to its support the very problems that I personally would use against it – namely that all people present ‘implied versions’ of themselves all the time, and that this is a great service to everybody forced to communicate with them.109 The implied author is a useful idea in that it creates a rhetorical distance between the person writing and his presentation in the text. From the point of view of biblical scholars one might argue that it is especially important to bear this distance in mind when looking at the truth-claims made by texts and their authors. However, a problem of more direct importance for the present work is the methodological ambiguity surrounding the term. The dialogue between Richard Walsh

105. See for example, Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. 106. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, pp.67–83. 107. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited (ed. Jane E. Lewin; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2nd edn, 1988), pp.64–6. 108. Walsh, Rhetoric of Fictionality, pp.82–5. 109. Wayne C. Booth, ‘Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother?’, in Phelan and Rabinowitz, eds., A Companion to Narrative Theory, pp.75–88.

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and Wayne Booth is intelligent and insightful,110 but ultimately I believe (and will argue in Chapters 3 and 4) that much confusion in narrative theory comes from a long-standing shortfall in the theory of communication generally, primarily in regard to the idea of fiction for which the term ‘implied author’ was originally constructed. I for one tend toward extreme caution, particularly in literary theory, of a naïve classification of authors and their statuses or roles.111 Consequently, I choose to avoid the methodological complication that comes from the use of the term ‘implied author’, leaving it to the reader to apply his own ideas on the problem as he sees fit.112 This section is here simply to show an awareness of the complexity involved, and for those readers who are not aware of the difficulties, to ensure that the term ‘author’ is understood neither to imply a full connection between author and narrator or a lack of distance between the authorial persona and the author as person. b. Target Audience/Ideal Reader I want to take a rather different stance with the reader, which is a different matter due to the different type of entity to which it refers. While the theoretical conceptualisation of authorship can be safely ignored barring certain qualifications, readers are a very different business and affect any argument that claims to engage with ‘ancient readers’, ‘original readers’, or ‘target readers’. The concept of ‘ideal reader’ is probably the best starting point. The term has its roots in New Criticism, and is defended by Cleanth Brooks, who states: 110. The term was coined by Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction. He defends the term in ‘Resurrection of the Implied Author: Why Bother?’, pp.75–88. Richard Walsh’s essay could be seen as a response addressing the entire theoretical body of fictional narrative, and is certainly intended to undermine Booth’s premises. Richard Walsh, ‘The Pragmatics of Narrative Fictionality’, in Phelan and Rabinowitz, eds., A Companion to Narrative Theory, pp.150–64. 111. Perhaps the most challenging questions are those raised by Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’, in The Foucault Reader (ed. Paul Rabinowitz; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp.101–20. 112. While I was impressed by the methodological section of Osvaldo Padilla, The Speeches of Outsiders in Acts: Poetics, Theology and Historiography (SNTSMS 144; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp.7–17, I cannot concur with his decision to use the terms ‘author’, ‘implied author’, and even ‘narrator’ interchangeably (pp.11–12). The latter term has a very distinct connotation in my view, though I accept that an omniscient narrator such as the one in Luke–Acts is not as far from the author as a limited narrator of whatever kind. The ‘we’ passages represent one very clear unknown in this respect, and should warn scholars to apply caution with such terminology. 1

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles The formalist critic assumes an ideal reader: that is, instead of focusing on the varying spectrum of possible readings, he attempts to find a central point of reference from which he can focus upon the structure of the poem or novel.113

In the years since Brooks made this statement about the assumption of an ideal reader, the concept has been extensively scrutinised, and for good reasons. Most obviously, it has its origins in a movement that was very much a reaction against the author-focused criticism that it succeeded, and as such was part of a deliberate move away from the author as controller of the text.114 Modern scholarship has found a better balance and no longer needs to sever the author from his work. Matthew L. Skinner complains of the ‘perfectionist connotations’115 implicit in the ‘ideal reader’; his reservations originate with Alastair Fowler, who observes the process of ‘construction’ in all reading while simultaneously arguing that no reader can fully know the author’s mind. Such an argument reduces the ideal reader to a theoretical construct rather than anything approaching the intended recipient of a communication.116 To avoid these difficulties and others (such as the question as to where Acts would have been read or performed) the term ‘target audience’ is preferred to ‘ideal reader’. The concept of the target audience is of specific importance to biblical studies because the object of study is not restricted to interpretation: one of the most important traditional aims of the historical critic (as distinct from the literary critic) is to look at the reality behind the text, and this inevitably means focusing not just on the events depicted in the text but also at who wrote it and who read it. Nonetheless, a focus on specific readers (such as the identity of Theophilus)117 cannot be anything but speculative in the vast majority of cases. The term ‘target audience’ encompasses not any individual but a broad ‘cultural repertoire’ that Luke could expect his readers to have at their disposal.118 The ideal 113. Cleanth Brooks, ‘The Formalist Critics’, in Literary Theory: An Anthology (ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan; Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), p.54. 114. See for example, Meyer H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), p.27. 115. Skinner, Locating Paul, p.15 n. 28. 116. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, pp.257–72. 117. For an overview see Robert F. O’Toole, ‘Theophilus’, in ABD, pp.511–12. Another good example of the assumption of Theophilus is in Gerald Downing, ‘Theophilus’s First Reading of Luke–Acts’, in Luke’s Literary Achievement: Collected Essays (ed. Christopher Mark Tuckett; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1995), pp.91–109. 118. Spencer, ‘Modern Literary Approaches’, p.409.

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reader is not an individual but a typical individual, who shares a body of literature and a range of ideological perspectives with the author. After all, an actual author writes his text, in the majority of cases, not for one reader, but for a number of individuals who he feels will have in common the ability to interpret his work, due to a shared knowledge, shared ideology, and shared ideas. These views cannot be entirely cognisant with that of the author – otherwise he would not need to write to them at all – but he must nonetheless feel sufficiently able to predict how his audience will react to what he writes, because of their common understanding of the world and of literature. The latter of these forms the subject of extensive investigation in this first half of the present work: in the former the social sciences are especially useful. As the preface to Neyrey’s The Social World of Luke–Acts: Models for Interpretation says: ‘The social sciences…look to typical, repeated patterns of social interaction characteristic of a given group of human beings in a specific time and place’.119 This knowledge allows the modern critic to understand ‘better the particular and distinctive’,120 which is to say that only by knowing what constitutes ‘typical’ can we understand what the author accepts and what he challenges. In essence, this is the same argument as Meir Sternberg uses in The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, which is entirely focused on literary theory as it applies to the Hebrew Bible.121 In this sense questions of history revolve around the sender and receivers of the text rather than the communicated events themselves. Joseph B. Tyson says in his discussion of scholarly trends: When I ask if we are moving back to history, I do not ask about historicity but rather about the historical and social context within which Acts was written and first heard or read. If it is the case that our author was a part of a literary world that prized rhetorical skills, what does the publication of Acts suggest to us about this world? Where does it fit in terms of what we know about the political, social, economic, even ideological and intellectual dimensions of this world?122

119. Jerome Neyrey, ed., The Social World of Luke–Acts: Models for Interpretation (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1991), p.xii. 120. Socio-rhetorical criticism can be seen in this light as providing information about the target audience. See the Introduction to Neyrey, Social World of Luke–Acts. 121. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, pp.7–22. 122. Joseph B. Tyson, ‘From Rhetoric to History and Back: Assessing New Trends in Acts Studies’, in Vander Stichele and Penner, eds., Contextualizing Acts, pp.39–40. 1

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This type of reading involves engaging empathetically with as many of the key ideological and literary constructs through which the target audience would have interpreted the text as possible, and can only ever be a partial and fragmented reconstruction. Yet despite the inherent weaknesses of creating such a typical target audience for Acts (or indeed, typical target audiences – a plurality of competences, such as the differences between Jewish and pagan readers, must be accounted for), it remains a necessary concept, primarily because of the distinct importance of that readership – the early church – to biblical studies. In this project, the target audience is understood as the readership Luke would have expected to find. When he alludes to Jewish ritual, concepts of honour and shame, citizenship, and other fundamental ideological constructs, the target audience would have had enough knowledge easily to understand his meaning and many of its complex allusions. There are of course countless differences between ancient ideology and our own, and some of them are no doubt vaster than we are able to comprehend, but it is possible to edge toward a better understanding through the text itself. c. Intentionality By ‘intentionality’ or ‘authorial intention’, I refer to the communicative aims of the author. I do not mean to suggest that Luke had a single theological intention in writing, nor do I want to imply that I have special access to what Luke wanted to achieve. Instead, the term reflects scholarship in literary theory, which after swinging away from an exclusive focus on the author in traditional scholarship to an almost complete rejection of that focus in New Criticism, has become comfortable with the fact that authors have communicative aims and strategies which they are attempting to convey in their work.123 Intentionality is difficult to define because people are not always fully aware of their intentions. For purely practical reasons, I want to see the concept as a spectrum with full, conscious intentionality at one end, semi-conscious intentionality in the middle, and assumed knowledge or presupposed ideas at the far end, representing that which the author does not really intend at all.

123. A fascinating article that elucidates this subject with considerable depth is Edward Jane, ‘The Rise and Fall of New Criticism: Its Brief Dialectic History from I.A. Richards to Northrop Frye’, American Studies 22, no. 1 (1975, rev. March 2005). Online: http://edwardjayne.com/critical/new_criticism.pdf (accessed 17 May 2012). 1

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Assumed knowledge or presupposed ideas are the presuppositions the author approves of unknowingly, such as the role of women, the status of ethnic groups, and some basic elements of his conception of the supernatural realm. Though the author communicates these ideas, he is seldom aware of doing so. These ideas form an essential basis for story-telling, and the target reader would no doubt have shared a great many of them, or at least been thoroughly familiar with the author’s position. Semi-conscious intentionality covers those communicative aims that the author fulfils naturally and without much thought. This category is important because traditional biblical scholarship (Redaktionkritik) has often overlooked it, consequently assuming that the author is fully conscious of all his communicative intentions. Andrew C. Clark feels able to say in 2001 that he hopes his study of the Peter/Paul parallels will shed some light on the ‘purpose of Acts as a whole’.124 His eventual argument is that the parallels demonstrate unity and continuity between Jewish and Gentile Christianity.125 I would question whether Luke would have held this to be his main purpose, or even his purpose at all, even while I agree that he probably intended to emphasise this point. My view moves this purpose lower down the spectrum and makes room for further, more deliberate communicative aims while not denying the possibility of other, less conscious intentions. Dennis R. MacDonald’s monograph on Acts as an imitation of Homer is more subtle, allowing for the possibility that ancient writers were always imitating one or another ancient text, but even his work appears to suppose that Luke would have carefully constructed those scenes that imitate Homer with a conscious, clear and often unitary intention.126 My own view would be that Luke imitated Homer in multiple ways without always giving it very much thought, and certainly without a unitary purpose. As becomes evident throughout this study, Luke borrows from a large body of literature in the composition of Acts, and is constantly in dialogue with multiple genres, texts and ideologies. The composition of such a complex and creative work requires a significant amount of semi-conscious intentionality. Like most authors, Luke had multiple communicative strategies, most of which were familiar to him from a lifetime of reading and were his only

124. Andrew C. Clark, Parallel Lives: The Relation of Paul to the Apostles in the Lucan Perspective (Waynesboro, GA: Paternoster, 2001), p.5. 125. Clark, Parallel Lives, pp.337–8. 126. MacDonald, Does Acts Imitate Homer?, p.2. An example might be Luke’s imitation of Hector’s farewell to Andromache in the Miletus speech, which, according to MacDonald, ‘serves a new interpretation of heroism’ (p.102). 1

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frames of reference for writing. His imitation of or dialogue with other genres and authors was his only and natural means of writing, and was for the most part constructed unconsciously. Full or conscious intentionality covers those parts of the text that are consciously and deliberately constructed. As Andrew Clark and Charles Talbert have demonstrated, Acts is constructed in complex parallels both internally and with Luke’s Gospel. Marianne Palmer-Bonz has shown that such techniques of construction were common in the period.127 I would not want to deny that Luke has conscious communicative aims or that he has deliberately designed his works to make those aims manifest in the most effective way possible. Conscious intentionality does have an important and undeniable role to play in interpreting Luke. However, the emphasis on this latter classification in biblical scholarship appears to have led scholars to believe that New Testament texts were written or redacted with the aim of conveying specific and singular theological agendas, much in the same way that Josephus wrote the Contra Apionem. I very much doubt even whether Josephus had a single intention when he wrote this text, but in any case, applying such a presupposition to Acts devalues the literary artistry and de-emphasises any subtleties that nuance meanings within the text. In large part, such suppositions both stem from and perpetuate the problems that have arisen in source theory. Thus, in this study I want to be clear on my opinion that while Luke did compose his work with a good degree of conscious, carefully structured thought and preparation, his communicative intentions were in large part of the more ordinary semi-conscious kind that inevitably forms the majority of any large narrative composition. The practical consequence of this is that while I frequently suggest that Luke is imitating, echoing, parodying or alluding to certain texts, this does not mean I am assuming he was aware of doing so. d. Mode Genre is the subject of this monograph and is discussed at considerable length over the next few chapters. However, while engaged in this discussion I found the term too broad adequately to cover all the various stratifications between bodies of literature. I have therefore used the term ‘mode’ to cover major differences in literary types that are not generic. Mostly, this distinction is used at the level of the fictional versus the historical mode. The term does also appear, however, in another sense common to literary theory, when the text is seen to rely consistently upon

1

127.

Palmer-Bonz, The Past as Legacy, pp.27, 48.

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a genre which it clearly could not be classified as. In this case one might say that Thucydides or Virgil makes use of the tragic mode, or that Hebrew novels make use of the Septuagintal mode. The two uses of the term are quite distinct in practice and are always intelligible in context. e. Narrative Configuration and Narrative Coherence Although these two terms will be rigorously described in the next part of the study, it might help the reader to describe briefly here what I do and do not mean by them. Narrative coherence is the sense made by the whole of the narrative, assessed as an accumulated total of all the parts that fit together. That is to say, an incoherent portion of a narrative is not incoherent in this sense because one cannot understand it, but because there appears to be no reason for it to be there, or worse, it appears to work at odds with other portions of the narrative. Thus Cervantes’ placing of Sancho Panza on a pony that has recently been stolen is narratively incoherent. Coherence is the sum total of the ability of each part to fit into the whole, but configuration is the process whereby the reader fits each part into that whole. The magically reappearing pony in Don Quixote cannot be configured – we know the pony is stolen, we do not think that Cervantes was depicting a reality where stolen ponies reappear without explanation, and we are left with no logical or sensible way to make sense of this element of the text. In the terms I am using, this constitutes a configurative failure: the reader cannot place the information usefully in the context of the wider narrative, and must be confused by it. One of the problems I discuss in the present study is the difference between history and fiction; I argue that coherence and configuration operate differently across these two modes. In history the reader expects to find the same logic as that which operates in the real world, while in fiction a different logic applies. While in practice there is probably no text of either mode that does not make use of both types of logic, the primacy of logic-type dictates reader expectations and to some extent perception of mode.

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Chapter 2

A SURVEY OF GENRE PROPOSALS

I. Introduction In this chapter it is necessary to review the most signi¿cant proposals that have been put forward for the genre of Acts. As was noted in the introduction to the study, scholarship can be roughly divided into those aiming to preserve a historiographical designation, usually of a Hellenistic variety, and those who are more interested in comparisons with nonhistorical literature. If ‘historical’ is contrasted with ‘non-historical’, ‘Hellenistic’ could in turn be contrasted with ‘Hebraic’ or perhaps more broadly, ‘Jewish’. The literature of Diasporic Judaism in this period was strongly inÀuenced by Hellenism, but retained a distinct style. Twentieth-century scholarship has been in general agreement that Acts was a Hellenistic historiography of some description, but has simultaneously remained keen to explore biblical allusion and Semitic style.1 Henry Joel Cadbury saw no contradiction in asserting that the Semitisms of Acts were stylistic at the same time as classifying the text as a history. In 1992 Mikeal C. Parsons observed that Robert C. Tannehill had ten references to non-canonical sources in his entire two-volume narrative commentary on Acts.2 So on the one hand, Jewish derived theologies and views of history are often assumed as normative for Luke and Acts,3 while at the same time, Hebrew historiography is not generally considered a viable generic classi¿cation for either text. In part, this is the heritage of a conservative approach that wants to claim the essential 1. James D. Yoder, ‘Semitisms in Codex Bezae’, JBL 78, no. 4 (1959), pp.317– 21; Donald W. Riddle, ‘The Logic of the Theory of Translation Greek’, JBL 51, no. 1 (1932), pp.13–30; Max Wilcox, The Semitisms of Acts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965); Sherman E. Johnson, ‘The Septuagint and the New Testament’, JBL 56, no. 4 (1937), pp.331–45. 2. Mikeal C. Parsons, ‘Reading Talbert: New Perspectives on Luke–Acts’, in Parsons and Tyson, eds., Cadbury, Knox, and Talbert, p.165; Tannehill, Narrative Unity, vol.1; Tannehill, Narrative Unity, vol.2. 3. Penner, ‘Contextualizing Acts’, p.12.

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continuity of the two testaments while lobbying for the truth-value of Acts (for which the ‘objective’ history of a Thucydides is considered a better option than the Torah). Luke wrote in Greek and probably to a Greek audience; it must be acknowledged that this rules out Hebrew historiography as a mutually available interpretative framework. However, it would not necessarily rule out a Jewish world-view. Jews were spread across the entire Diaspora during this period, and were immersed in Greek literature. The Diaspora was a literary as well as a cultural fact. Hebrew historiography is a long way distant from a multiculturally inÀuenced Judaism that was Greek speaking, was writing in the Greek language, and even preferred its Hebrew-language Scriptures translated into Greek for them. Sharp divisions between Jewish and Hebrew style had been substantially blurred by a long process of cultural integration, and a strict line between the two literary milieux probably cannot be sustained.4 In practice, however, most scholarship tends to swing one way or the other. Following recent trends, Joseph B. Tyson has expressed concerns that the Jewish element to Acts (‘Luke is “obsessed” with the Jews’) is being undervalued.5 Perhaps this is true, but a signi¿cant volume of contributions that focus on the Jewish side of things was published just a few years before Tyson wrote, and did offer some valuable insights.6 William Kurz, for example, observes in it that there is a growing consensus that Luke’s two volumes are centrally concerned with promise and ful¿lment of Old Testament prophecy.7 Yet scholars who remained keen to ¿nd a rigid generic class in which to place Acts did not have an option that incorporated both Jewish and Greek elements until Gregory Sterling’s 1992 monograph on a genre he called ‘apologetic history’. II. A Look at Some Proposals a. Acts as an Apologetic History Something like this genre designation was put forward under the name ‘general history’ by David Aune, who discusses several variants of 4. A good overview of this subject can be found in Andrie Du Toit, ‘Paulus Oecumenicus: Interculturality in the Shaping of Paul’s Theology’, NTS 55 (2009), pp.121–43. 5. Tyson, ‘From History to Rhetoric and Back’, pp.38, 41. 6. Moessner, Jesus and the Heritage of Israel. 7. William S. Kurz, ‘Promise and Ful¿llment in Hellenistic Jewish Narratives and Luke–Acts’, in Moessner, ed., Jesus and the Heritage of Israel, pp.147–70. 1

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history that he thinks could be classi¿ed under this umbrella term. These include Genealogy or Mythography, Travel Descriptions, Local History, Chronography, and History proper. This genre he describes as narrating the important historical experiences of a single national group from their origin to the recent past. This usually involved contacts with other nations […It] is a genre that ¿rst appeared in the Hellenistic period. In one sense, Herodotus anticipated general history because of the scope of his undertaking. Yet for the ancients, general history began with the Historai of Ephorus.8

Aune’s approach to the genre of Acts is most often summarised by his somewhat problematic remark: By itself, Luke could (like Mark, Matthew and John) be classi¿ed as a type of ancient biography. But Luke, though it might have circulated separately, was subordinated to a larger literary structure. Luke does not belong to a type of ancient biography for it belongs with Acts, and Acts cannot be forced into a biographical mold.9

While Aune argues that unity tells against a separate classi¿cation, it might be easier to suggest that a separate classi¿cation tells against unity. The fact that left to its own devices Luke could be neatly ¿tted into the same genre as the other gospels, but in combination with Acts can be called nothing more precise than ‘general history’, must be suggestive of a problem. Realising this, Richard Burridge comments that ‘this is an odd result; some other way of dealing with the problem of the two-volume nature of Luke–Acts needs to be found: perhaps Luke itself could be one genre, and Acts another, related genre’.10 His suggestion must be taken seriously – especially if Aune’s hypothesis is the result of not doing so. Aune achieves his classi¿cation by describing historiography in terms of method rather than form, which allows him to de¿ne Acts as historiography purely on the grounds of the preface’s claim to be reporting truth. His belief in the strong unity of Luke–Acts allows him to utilise the truth-claims made in the Gospel to bolster Acts’ own claims. Gregory Sterling shares Aune’s basic designation, but signi¿cantly improves and clari¿es his ideas. The hypothesis that Acts can be located within a tradition in which non-Greeks de¿ne and describe their own 8. David E. Aune, The New Testament in its Literary Environment (Cambridge: Clarke, 1988), p.88. 9. Aune, Literary Environment, p.77; Burridge, What Are the Gospels?, p.103; Balch, ‘Jesus as Founder’, p.141; Philips, ‘The Genre of Acts’, p.376; Palmer, ‘Acts and the Historical Monograph’, p.374. 10. Burridge, What Are the Gospels?, p.103.

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histories in order to engage with Greek views of their people, and ultimately to put their own perspective forward, certainly ¿nds common ground with Aune, but bene¿ts from more speci¿city in the tracing of a tradition and its rhetoric, as Sterling himself reÀects when he says ‘I cannot see how Aune can place Polybios and Berossos in the same subdivision! The gulf that separates them is far greater than what they might share in common.’11 Sterling’s meticulous and well-evidenced work has reached such status that Thomas E. Philips’ recent review of the genre question looked toward apologetic history and mythomachia (see MacDonald, below) as two strands of an approaching consensus on the genre of Acts.12 Sterling works very hard to trace the tradition of apologetic historiography back beyond Herodotus as far as Hekataios of Miletus, in the early ¿fth century BCE (Hekataios advised Miletos not to revolt against Perisa in 499). The tradition is then traced through Herodotos, Hekataios of Abdera, Megasthenes, Berossos, and Manethon, through to the Hellenistic Jewish Historians Demetrios, Artapanos, Pseudo-Eupolemos, Eupolemos and ¿nally to Josephus, who is roughly contemporary to Luke. Having drawn out the common apologetic purpose of these texts, as well as some key similarities in style and content, he then goes on to analyse Luke–Acts (as a unity) in the same way, concluding that Acts ¿ts neatly into this tradition: The author shared the same outlook as the writers of this genre: they belonged to subgroups within the larger Greco-Roman world. It was this consciousness which led them to write the story of their group (Content). Common to all of the works is the emphasis on the antiquity of the group. The way the author made his case varied: it could be chronological as in Berossos, Manethon, Demetrios, Eupolemos, and Josephos; it could be through cultural claims as in the tradition before Josephos; or it could be by claiming continuity with a tradition recognized for its antiquity as in Luke–Acts.13

As indicative of a common socio-ideologically driven need to justify oneself when living as an alien under a superior political power, Sterling certainly ¿nds a common strand that emphasises a tradition of writing. Likewise he argues that certain Hellenised or Hellenising elements, both in terms of literary style and cultural alignment, are present in most of these texts.

1

11. Sterling, Historiography and Self-de¿nition, p.10 n.54. 12. Philips, ‘The Genre of Acts’, p.385. 13. Sterling, Historiography and Self-de¿nition, pp.386–7.

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles

Gregory Sterling’s contribution to the genre of Acts has and will continue to be extremely inÀuential in its recognition of generic hybridity that reconciles the Jewish with the Hellenistic elements of Acts. Ultimately, however, it fails to convince as a genre hypothesis. The ideology of self-justi¿cation has no generic basis, and could come in a variety of forms. Contra Apionem might constitute the classic apology, but in its way, the Aeneid justi¿es the antiquity of the Romans, their right to rule, and their place in the world. Polybius and Dio Cassius propagate similar agendas in their Hellenistic and Roman histories. Most texts are apologetic in some respect, whether for a personal perspective on the world, the worthiness of true love, or divine sanction for an empire. When faced with authors who share a common life-situation (a foreigner living in a Greek city, a Jew living among pagans, etc.), there will be similar agendas present across a range of genres. A concrete manifestation of this problem becomes evident in Sterling’s reservations about Artapanus: Virtually all contemporary assessments of it attach the term ‘romance’ to it. We need to be careful, however, about how we de¿ne romance. Romance in the sense of novel is not an appropriate designation for Artapanos. The extant novels which we have differ greatly from Artapanos: they are heavily erotic, are personal in their orientation, and are designed to entertain rather than make claims on behalf of the author’s own ethnic group… I would therefore call it a romantic national history… What makes it history rather than romance is its purpose.14

Sterling wants to keep Artapanus within the genre he has designated because he meets all the criteria that can be put forward for this designation. Ultimately, however, Artapanus cannot easily be squeezed into this mould. Richard I. Pervo, writing before Sterling and with a rather different agenda, goes further in his description of Artapanus: Why is Artapanus most often called a novel but Demetrius, Eupolemus, Cleodemus, and 2 Maccabees described as history? Of the fragmentary writings…only Eupolemus and Artapanus present questions of genre. Eupolemus is laudatory and apologetic. He does not shrink from invention, especially of letters. His narrative style must have been exuberant. This is no Thucydides redivivus, but he is a historian of sorts. In the case of Artapanus, however, a different spirit is at work.15

14. Sterling, Historiography and Self-de¿nition, pp.186, 187. 15. Pervo, Pro¿t with Delight, p.118; See also Lawrence M. Wills, ‘The Jewish Novellas’, in Greek Fiction: The Greek Novel in Context (ed. John R. Morgan and Richard Stoneman; New York: Routledge, 1994), especially pp.223–4.

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Pervo observes that Artapanus’ style is far closer to a novelist than a historian.16 So Sterling and Pervo see a similar problem with Artapanus, and though both ¿t the text into their own generic schema, one has to side with Pervo on the issue of classi¿cation and conclude that Artapanus must be considered an entertaining story featuring some historical ¿gures, but being mostly ¿ctional in style. Acts is closer in style to Artapanus than to the other historians Sterling discusses, and if he must be placed in a different genre, his relationship to Acts cannot simply be ignored. Neither Acts nor Artapanus can be easily placed among the apologetic historians. The problem of Acts’ apparently closer relationship to Artapanus than to the more ‘historical’ histories is also present elsewhere. Niehoff, for example, highlights several aspects of Josephus’ narrative technique which combine to reduce and minimise tension in the narrative episodes and therefore reassure the reader of God’s benevolence.17 This is at enormous variance with Luke’s style, especially in Acts. Another signi¿cant difference – that of explicit narration – is dismissed by Clare K. Rothschild as part of Luke’s ‘simultaneous commitment to biblical history, which precluded open exposure of authorial commentary of the type prevalent in Polybius and Josephus’.18 But Josephus cannot be accused of a lack of commitment to biblical history, especially in Antiquities. The difference between explicit and implicit narration dictates style to such an extent that it raises questions about whether the the two techniques can be represented by the same genre.19 b. Acts as an Institutional History Hubert Cancik describes Luke–Acts as ‘a History that narrates the spread of an institution, a thesis that applies to both logoi; that is, the ¿rst logos is not a biography’,20 which places him to some extent alongside Aune. His own slant on this genre nonetheless brings new elements into the discussion. He argues that Luke–Acts contains ten features of this genre, and provides examples from the wider literature and from Luke–Acts of these features. The list entails: 16. Pervo, Pro¿t with Delight, pp.118–19. 17. Maren R. Niehoff, ‘Two Examples of Josephus’ Narrative Technique in his “Rewritten Bible” ’, JSJ 27, no. 1 (1996), pp.31–45. 18. Rothschild, Luke–Acts and the Rhetoric of History, pp.95–6. 19. See also: Byrskog, ‘History or Story?’, p.265; and Campbell, ‘ “He”, “Me”, and “We” ’. 20. Hubert Cancik, ‘The History of Culture, Religion, and Institutions in Ancient Historiography: Philological Observations Concerning Luke’s History’, JBL 116, no. 4 (1997), p.673. 1

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1. Election of successors(s)/election to supplement leadership: a ¿xed topos in the historiography of philosophy and religion (Acts 1.12-26; 6.1-7). 2. De¿nition of Membership: 1.21-26 (criteria for apostles); 10.45; 11.18; 15.1-31 (reception of the Spirit). 3. Financial Questions: no fees are charged, and there is ‘life in common’ in the Academy (Acts 2.44-45; 4.32-35; ch.11). 4. External Growth (Acts 1.15; 2.41, 47; 4.4; 8.14; 9.31). 5. Elaboration as a consequence of Growth (such as in Lucian’s account of the addition of mystery initiation in the Glycon cult) (Acts 15.22-29). 6. Reports of internal structure, roles, functions, and leadership of the group (Acts 13.1-3; 20.8; 21.8). 7. The relationship between periphery and centre (Acts 11.22-23, though Cancik admits this is not really a topos of the genre). 8. Naming: a ¿xed topos (Acts 11.26). 9. Boundary setting over against other organisations (see 10). 10. Divisions within Schools, new foundations and apostasy (throughout, mainly with Jews).21 Cancik’s argument has several strengths, principal among which is its engagement with philosophical schools and other institutions of the period; fundamental aspects of culture that must be considered part of the target audience’s cultural repertoire. As Christoph Heil observes: The new Classicism of the Augustan time showed increasing interest in ‘old’ and ‘foreign’ wisdom. Luke is very well aware of this interest and uses it in his presentation. The interpretatio Graeca of Luke and the later Christian apologists made it possible to understand the eschatological Jewish prophet and his followers as ‘philosophers’.22

Cancik shows that Acts’ engagement with Hellenistic philosophy is serious and sustained. Yet there are signi¿cant problems with his classi¿cation. Primarily, this ‘theme’ can only be said to account for most of the narrative of the ¿rst six chapters of Acts (remembering that Cancik wants to account for Luke–Acts in its entirety).23 Both before and after this, institutional growth does not seem to account for the whole of the narrative. While it is evident that there are elements of institutional development characterising the book of Acts, using this genre to account

1

21. Cancik, ‘Institutions in Ancient Historiography’, p.679. 22. Heil, ‘Arius Didymus and Luke–Acts’, pp.390–1. 23. Cancik, ‘Institutions in Ancient Historiography’, p.673.

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for all of Acts, let alone Luke–Acts, would represent a serious underreading of the narrative. Mark Reasoner expresses this concern when he argues: If one starts with the narrative of Acts, these parallels begin to appear more incidental than constitutive of Acts’ plot. The story that comes to us in Acts is more focused. If we allow institutional history such thematic prominence as to entitle the story in accord with it, we will miss a bigger point that Luke is making in Acts: divine necessity plays out in the lives of those who proclaim and encounter the word of Jesus.24

Reasoner is able to follow this line of argument for all of Cancik’s ten points, and with considerable success. His alternative theme of ‘Divine necessity in History’25 does not constitute a genre, but does account for more of Acts’ content, and makes the story more cohesive. For Reasoner, Cancik has highlighted some useful points, but they are secondary and not constitutive of a genre.26 Christoph Heil attempts to explore Cancik’s suggestions by looking more closely at sub-genres of philosophical history. He attempts to narrow Cancik’s classi¿cation to one of three of these, and ¿nds that Arius Didymus, whose work represents the only sub-genre of philosophical history that is interested in biographical as well as philosophical issues, is the best ¿t.27 After a lengthy and judicious attempt at comparison he concludes: The comparison of Luke–Acts with Arius Didymus showed only a few, rather super¿cial connections and, at the same time, made the exceptional position of Luke’s history clear. The author of Luke–Acts does not share the strictly philosophical and historiographical features of the ʌİȡȚ ¸ÀɼʼÑÅ genre. Therefore Cancik’s thesis that Luke’s second book is related to the ancient historiography of philosophy, must be rejected.28

His objections are mostly narratival, if less explicitly so than Reasoner’s.29 These two scholars ¿nd through their quite different methodologies that the sort of history Cancik proposes simply does not account for the

24. Mark Reasoner, ‘The Theme of Acts: Institutional History or Divine Necessity in History?’, JBL 118, no. 4 (1999), p.636. 25. There is certainly an argument that this is a key theme of many ancient works, both history and ¿ction. This is of course not the place to engage properly with Reasoner’s ideas. 26. Reasoner, ‘The Theme of Acts’, p.659. 27. Heil, ‘Arius Didymus and Luke–Acts’, p.360. 28. Heil, ‘Arius Didymus and Luke–Acts’, p.393. 29. Heil, ‘Arius Didymus and Luke–Acts’, pp.384–7. 1

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connectedness and purpose of the story, including the interaction of speeches, miracles and travel narratives. Reasoner also goes so far as to ask for more clari¿cation on what the boundaries of such a genre as ‘Institutional History’ might be.30 c. Acts and the Ancient Bios In 1974, Charles Talbert proposed that Acts is an example of the ancient Bios genre. More speci¿cally, his suggestion was that Luke–Acts is a philosophical biography of Jesus (the Gospel) and his successors (Acts). His main focus is on the succession component of the Lives of philosophers, which he believed, extrapolating mainly from Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, frequently followed an A+B format like that of Luke–Acts. The ¿rst and most obvious point to be made here is that Talbert makes this case in order to explain the unity of Luke–Acts: the designation makes the Gospel the biography of ‘a founder of a philosophical movement’ and Acts ‘a biography of his successors’. Burridge has already elaborated greatly the idea of Gospel as biography, but the sort of description he uses for the Bios genre could not apply to Acts: ÀÇÀ are works mostly in prose narrative and of medium length; their structure is a bare chronological framework of birth/arrival and death with topical material inserted; the scale is always limited to the subject; a mixture of literary units, notably anecdotes, stories, speeches and sayings, selected from a wide range of oral and written sources, displays the subject’s character indirectly through words and deeds.31

This citation makes it evident that the generic classi¿cation of biography, while perhaps not perfect for Luke’s Gospel, is far more appropriate to his ¿rst volume than to Acts.32 Talbert’s theory attempts to resolve this problem by making Acts the biography of a number of people, chosen because they followed in the footsteps of the founder. Thus the ¿rst half of Acts would be about Peter, the second about Paul. He hypothesised

30. Reasoner, ‘The Theme of Acts’, pp.648–9; Burridge, What Are the Gospels?, pp.40–2. 31. Burridge, What Are the Gospels?, p.153. A recent defence of this hypothesis can be found in ‘Reading the Gospels as Biography’, in The Limits of Ancient Biography (ed. J. Mossman and Brian Ging; Swansea: The Classical Press of Wales, 2006), pp.31–50. 32. For some interesting and pertinent reservations about reading the Gospels as biography see Mark Edwards, ‘Gospel and Genre: Some Reservations’, in Mossman and Ging, eds., The Limits of Ancient Biography, pp.51–62. 1

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that Luke used the succession theme to demonstrate the continuity of teaching between Jesus and his apostles in order to support what he considered to be the correct take on Christianity. Talbert’s desired contribution to the genre debate seems to be a classi¿cation of Acts alongside the (b) volume of intellectual biography, which forces Luke–Acts into a subgenre whose existence is for the most part implied through the work of Diogenes Laertius; but this is the least persuasive part of his argument – something that is widely acknowledged.33 The evidence Talbert produces for this is by no means extensive, proving little more than that biographies of philosophers contained succession narrative. It must also be observed that the succession elements available in antiquity tend to form a relatively small proportion of the overall work. Perhaps his best example, the life of Pythagoras, dedicates only ch.36 to succession. In a balanced appraisal of Talbert’s suggestion, J. Bradley Chance is forced to admit: The (a+b) pattern was not a dominant pattern in ancient biographical literature. Of the plethora of lives, noted by Talbert himself for example, only a handful offer such a pattern. And only a number out of this handful offers much more than a mere list of successors. Such a lack of numbers proves nothing on a purely theoretical basis, but does allow one to ask whether the pattern was prevalent enough that the author of Luke–Acts could have expected his readers to pick up on this pattern and interpret the function of his two-volume work accordingly.34

Loveday Alexander has suggested that this (a+b) model may not exist in the sense Talbert proposes. Most of the examples we have come from compilations of Lives and are not drawn up by people af¿liated with the school. So while Talbert has: Anecdotes

ĺ Life

ĺ Collected Lives

the ‘Life’ element remains largely hypothetical. Alexander points out that it might be reduced to: Anecdotes

ĺCollection35

33. Philips, ‘The Genre of Acts’, p.368; J. T. Carroll, ‘Luke–Acts’, in The New Testament Today (ed. Mark Allan Powell; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1999), pp.58–69; Alexander, Acts in its Ancient Literary Context, pp.43–68. 34. J. Bradley Chance, ‘Talbert’s New Perspectives on Luke–Acts: The ABC’s of Ancient Lives’, in Parsons and Tyson, eds., Cadbury, Knox, and Talbert, p.193. 35. Alexander, Acts in its Ancient Literary Context, p.55.

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Neither is her abbreviated model purely hypothetical; evidence for it comes from the life of Socrates, which went straight from the anecdotes provided by Plato, Xenophon, Aristophanes and others, into Lives, without ever being converted into a biography. Talbert has brought the cultural and narrative trope of succession to the attention of scholarship, but these ideas do not have speci¿c generic connotations. To claim that two- or multi-volume works with succession as a key element were produced in schools founded by particular philosophers is stretching the evidence. Talbert’s hypothesis begins to look more important when related to succession in the Old Testament. The key successions of the Old Testament, Moses to Joshua, David to Solomon and Elijah to Elisha, clearly resonate well with Acts: Moses and David in particular are frequently cited by the Apostles and by disciples. The story of Elijah and Elisha may not be cited directly, but there are certainly parallels, particularly with the Ascension and also with miracles. Peter’s raising of a dead woman from her bed is, for example, not only parallel to a miracle of Jesus, but to a miracle shared by Elijah and Elisha.36 These parallels always deserve serious consideration when examining the intertextual relations of Acts, and Talbert is right to bring them in. His survey of succession in the Old Testament is wide-ranging and useful, and ¿rmly ¿xes the apostles within a tradition as successors to Jesus. In recent times Talbert has conceded that ‘various genres were shaped by the succession principle’,37 a realisation which allows the really useful points of his analysis to be brought into the discussion without having to make unjusti¿ed leaps in terms of genre. Thus, Talbert deserves credit not just for some very sound observations about Acts, but also for having the humility to concede defeat on a point he put forward very vigorously. Overall, it must be said that Talbert has earnestly sought to solve the problem of the genre of Luke–Acts, and has been resourceful and tenacious in his attempt to do so. The wider consensus, including of late, perhaps, his own opinion, is that he has not quite succeeded. Nonetheless, his work has earned my sincere admiration for its boldness, scope and innovation, and has advanced the study of Acts in many respects.

36. 1 Kgs 17.17-24; 2 Kgs 4.8-37; Acts 9.35-43. 37. Charles H. Talbert, ‘Succession in Mediterranean Antiquity: Luke–Acts’, in Society of Biblical Literature 1998 Seminar Papers: One Hundred Thirty-fourth Annual Meeting, November 21–24, 1998, Walt Disney World Swan and Walt Disney World Dolphin, Orlando, Florida (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998), p.175. 1

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d. Acts and the Historical Monograph Darryl W. Palmer suggested in 1992 that Acts should be considered an historical monograph.38 He was not the ¿rst to do so; Conzelmann had suggested the same in 1963,39 Plümacher and Hengel in 1979.40 Palmer describes the historical monograph as a selective history covering a speci¿c period or event, and cites examples such as Sallust’s Catiline Conspiracy and Jugurthine War, but also shows that Cicero had a concept of it, as did Polybius. He says of Sallust: His works conform to the theoretical requirements for a short monograph: they each comprise a single volume, cover a limited historical period, and focus on one theme and, to a signi¿cant extent, on one person.41

This description more or less agrees with Aune’s, and while there is some room for debate over whether something like The Peloponnesian Wars could be considered a monograph, there is suf¿cient speci¿ty here to see that Acts might easily be said to ¿t into such a genre.42 The trouble is that the monograph is not really a genre at all. Richard Pervo makes this point,43 and has the support of such scholarly heavyweights as Ben Perry,44 who uses the term to discuss the novel. Palmer’s discussion itself implies an element of crossover between novel and monograph: He cites Gabba, for example, who says, ‘In the same climate of paradoxographical literature the “novel” is born and develops; the novel in antiquity is in fact a form of history’.45 Conzelmann, meanwhile, suggests this designation for 3 Maccabees, which is not easy to classify as Hellenistic historiography.46 38. Palmer, ‘Acts and the Historical Monograph’. 39. Conzelmann, Acts, p.xl. 40. Eckhard Plümacher, ‘Die Apostelgeschichte als historische Monographie’, in Kremer, ed., Les Actes des Apôtres, pp.457–66; Martin Hengel, Acts and the History of Earliest Christianity (London: SCM, 1979), p.36. 41. Palmer, ‘Acts and the Historical Monograph’, p.387. 42. I restrain myself from being pedantic about the length of a monograph, since it is not a point I have a particular need to argue; but one only has to look at the difference in length between Jugurtha and Catiline to see how the issue might be problematised. 43. Pervo, Pro¿t with Delight, p.6 n.35. 44. Ben Edwin Perry, The Ancient Romances: A Literary-historical Account of their Origins (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp.146–7. 45. Emilio Gabba, ‘Literature’, in Sources for Ancient History (ed. Michael Hewson Crawford; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p.15. 46. Conzelmann, Acts, p.6. For a full and useful discussion of the problem of classifying 3 Maccabees, see Sara Raup Johnson, Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity: Third Maccabees in its Cultural Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 1

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Palmer is correct to note that the historical monograph could be as entertaining as a novel,47 but he does not discuss the manner in which one can differentiate between different kinds of monograph, and thus approach some kind of generic classi¿cation. Pervo observes: The monograph is an important formal category for comparison with Acts. Not all monographs were historical. The structure could be used for outright ¿ction or other purposes. Monograph refers more to a structure and design than to a speci¿c genre.48

The monograph is therefore better described as a format than a genre, though it is perhaps diagnostic in the sense that it ¿ts some genres better than others. e. Acts and Epic Although it is not particularly common to see Acts compared to Epic, in the ancient world Epic was so important to education and culture that anybody who could read Greek probably knew Homer.49 As the most inÀuential of all texts in this period, the Homeric epics in particular provide two certain reference points between the author and audience of any text in that milieu. T. J. Luce begins his book The Greek Historians with a discussion of Homeric inÀuence, and makes it clear that this is fundamental to understanding them. According to him, imitation of and reaction against Homer shaped the historical mode more than any other factor.50 If it has been under-explored as a genre, Todd Penner explains the scholarly reluctance to depart from historiographical models: The delineation of Acts as a piece of ancient historia says something about personal commitments to both Acts and history; it means something to designate early Christian texts in this manner. The resistance to reading Acts as a novel or epic – in part because of the undeniable aura of ¿ctionality that surrounds those genres – suggests that speci¿c theological and ideological commitments shape the kinds of questions we ask and the methods we practice.51

As if to illustrate Todd Penner’s point, Clare K. Rothschild attacks Marianne Palmer-Bonz for trying to ‘claim for Luke–Acts one category over another’.52 Rothschild would suggest that the inÀuence of Epic does 47. Palmer, ‘Acts and the Historical Monograph’, pp.374–5, 388. 48. Pervo, Pro¿t with Delight, p.6. 49. Karl Olav Sandnes, The Challenge of Homer: School, Pagan Poets and Early Christianity (LNTS 400; London: T&T Clark, 2009), pp.3–58. 50. T. James Luce, The Greek Historians (London: Routledge, 1997), pp.1–6. 51. Penner, ‘Contextualizing Acts’, pp.11–12. 52. Rothschild, Luke–Acts and the Rhetoric of History, p.8 n.30. 1

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not equate to history, and of course, she is right. But if ancient audiences perceived history as intimately related to Epic, this does not mean they would not be able to delineate between the examples of that genre discussed by Palmer-Bonz and the histories that Sterling and Rothschild discuss, even when the differences that enable such delineation are not very clear to a modern critic. The ancients’ generic perceptions must have been as appropriate to their own literature as our modern ones are for ours. Nonetheless, Palmer-Bonz does go too far when she argues that Acts is an Epic: Indeed, could it be that Luke–Acts was composed as a foundational Epic for the newly emerging Christian communities of the Greco Roman world, written to confer ancient Israel’s religious heritage de¿nitely and exclusively upon the church?53

Dennis MacDonald, another important voice in this area, argues that interpreters need to consider the Hellenistic literature and the Epics in particular, just as much as Jewish literature, when interpreting Acts. His examples do not serve to interpret Acts as Epic, as Palmer-Bonz appears to do, so much as some of Acts in the light of Epic,54 a practice of which Gregory Sterling also notes the value.55 Alexander makes some very useful points on this subject, most important of which is her observation that ‘Such readings can be exciting and illuminating in their own right, but they are essentially ahistorical: they tell us nothing of deliberate imitation or conscious evocation’.56 This is a basic but under-appreciated reality: Homer was so pervasive as a cultural phenomenon that imitation did not require much conscious thought, less perhaps than stock Shakespeare tropes from Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet, which are used today without any conscious reference to the plays themselves. But while such unconscious imitation is bad news if it is a single redactional purpose that is being sought, it is nonetheless a literary fact, and must be dealt with, whether it is quanti¿able and controllable or not – particularly in the case of epic inÀuence on Greek literature.57 53. Palmer-Bonz, The Past as Legacy, p.29. 54. I do not agree with Sandnes, ‘Imitatio Homeri? An Appraisal of Dennis R. MacDonald’s “Mimesis Criticism”’, JBL 4 (2005), pp.715–32, who appears to want allusions to be actual references before he will accept them. Such an approach would ensure that Acts is never understood in its literary context. 55. Sterling, Historiography and Self-de¿nition, p.361. 56. Alexander, Acts in its Ancient Literary Context, p.169. 57. Alexander, Acts in its Ancient Literary Context, p.173. 1

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f. Acts and the Novel Richard Pervo, in his 1987 book, Pro¿t With Delight, convincingly argued that more parallels can be found between Acts and the novels of the period than between Acts and historiography. His use of the comparison was not the ¿rst,58 but is certainly the most extensive. Often criticised for wrongly designating Acts a novel, Pervo himself is reluctant to make such a claim. He makes two particularly important points with signi¿cant interpretative rami¿cations. These are judiciously summarised by Thomas E. Philips: For Pervo, Acts was distinguished from the histories of the era by two major criteria. First, Acts was a popular, as opposed to a learned, document. ‘Luke did not write a learned treatise. He was a “popular” writer’… Second, as popular literature, Acts maintained a deeper interest in entertaining its readers than did the learned historiography of the time… For Pervo, many of the literary themes (e.g. persecution, conspiracies, riots and travels) and literary devices (e.g. wit and irony) in Acts would have entertained ancient readers and encouraged them to read Acts as something other than historiography…59

Cadbury made the same conclusion about the popular nature of Acts in 1958, suggesting that his sources were to blame.60 More recently, Loveday Alexander has made the same assertion.61 If true, the designation of ‘popular literature’ does not place Acts within a speci¿c genre, but does further distance it from the Thucydidean tradition. The designation of ‘popular’ has also met with support from outside of biblical studies. Richard Stoneman approvingly cites M. Reiser’s 1984 study of Mark’s Gospel and the Alexander Romance, whose common elements range from syntactic features to aspects of narrative style, including parataxis and repetition, absence of complex narrative, vagueness of geographical and chronological reference, ideal scenes and miracles which accompany the deaths of Jesus and Alexander. Both texts thus exhibit the linguistic and stylistic features of popular literature in the service of a portrait of a unique ¿gure.62 58. Susan Marie Praeder, ‘Luke–Acts and Ancient Novel’, in Society of Biblical Literature 1981 Seminar Papers (ed. Kent Harold Richards; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), pp.269–92; Praeder, ‘Luke–Acts and Ancient Novel’; S. P. Schierling and M. J. Schierling, ‘The InÀuence of the Ancient Romances on the Acts of the Apostles’, ClasBul 54 (1978), pp.81–8. 59. Philips, ‘The Genre of Acts’, pp.369–70. 60. Cadbury, The Making of Luke–Acts, p.134. 61. Alexander, Acts in its Ancient Literary Context, p.206. 62. Morgan and Stoneman, eds., Greek Fiction, p.124; M. Reiser, ‘Der Alexanderroman und das Markusevangelium’, in Markusphilologie (ed. Hubert Cancik; WUNT, 33; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 1984), pp.131–63. 1

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MacDonald has also compared Mark’s Gospel to Homer, and has highlighted illuminating parallels,63 raising the possibility that Mark is able to present the story of Jesus in dialogue with the Greek Epics and the legends surrounding Alexander the Great. Such complex dialogue makes a good deal of sense in terms of the importance Mark attributes to Jesus and the events surrounding him. Add to this that the Alexander Romance almost certainly imitates Homer,64 and that Mark certainly imitates and alludes to the Septuagint, and one is faced with multiple levels of complexity behind and beyond the surface texture of the Gospel. This makes simple linear interpretation that treats the text as if it were directly mimetic something of a fallacy. Pervo observes the likelihood that Mark is a source for Acts, and this is an important point: if Mark is a source for Luke, it must have been available to him as a potential source for Acts. Pervo notes similarities between Acts 1.7 and Mk 13.3265 and Acts 5.12-16 and Mk 6.55-5666 as instances where this appears to have occurred.67 If biblical scholars are uncomfortable exploring Acts in the light of texts like the Alexander Romance, it may be due to the perception of history as having a certain staid, static form. This preconception about what history should look like makes a presupposition about Acts as historia also one against Acts as a popular text. In recent times, genre theorists have challenged this assumption: I want to argue against the customary assumption that history is a single, stable, and rather decorous literature and suggest instead that it is best understood as a cluster of overlapping and competing genres, ‘low’ as well as ‘high’. The result is a much more nuanced and Àexible picture of historical thought – one that is better able to accommodate the range of methods, ideologies, and rhetorics that make up the practice of any given era of historical writing. And since the so-called ‘minor’ genres often give us the best evidence of the force of new agendas or the demands of new audiences, a genre theory that pays attention to the full range of historical writing is much better able to capture the sense of new directions in thought or practice.68

63. Dennis R. MacDonald, The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 64. Richard Stoneman, ‘The Alexander Romance: From History to Fiction’, in Morgan and Stoneman, eds., Greek Fiction, p.120. 65. Pervo, Dating Acts, p.36. 66. Pervo, Dating Acts, p.37. 67. Pervo, Dating Acts, pp.35–49. 68. Phillips, ‘Histories, Micro- and Literary’, p.213.

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If Mark Salber Philips is correct, even ¿xing Acts within a matrix of historical genres will require a broad understanding of history and contemporary historically orientated texts. It is possible that the interpretation of Acts, as well as insights into the ideological demands that underlie its form, suffer as a consequence of a narrow conception of history that is not necessarily accurate. The second of Pervo’s arguments summarised by Philips is that Acts creates suspense and excitement,69 and that this is rather more in the novelistic than the historiographical way. It is a dif¿cult point to prove, because histories do contain many exciting episodes70 – but it is a good general observation, that Acts is indeed very concerned to entertain, and is full of exciting episodes, miracles and last minute escapes, which are in a density and style very unlike that of Hellenistic historiography. In histories the improbable is generally commented upon and assessed for likelihood, which allows the narrator to maintain credibility whether or not his audience accepts the account he presents them with – in Acts this is never the case. While neither the generation of suspense, the presence of exciting episodes or the lack of critical distance are not without parallel in Hellenistic historiography, their pervasive role in the narrative strategy of Acts also appear to distinguish it from that genre. In short, there are more unbelievable events than a historian would narrate, and less critical distance than a historian would create if he narrated them. Pervo’s later article on ‘Direct Speech in Acts’ as indicative of genre shows that Acts has around 51% direct speech,71 behind only Aseneth, Callirhoe and the Protevangelium of James, and marginally ahead of Judith and Susanna, two Jewish novellas. The ¿rst historian to ¿gure in the list is Sallust’s Catiline, with 28%.72 Polybius’ Histories, on the other hand, does not have enough direct speech to achieve 1%.73 This survey of the relevant contemporary literature aligns Acts more closely with the ‘Jewish novella’. These unrepentantly popular novellas vary in content but have a consistent ideology; some of their themes vary and others are remarkably consistent; the most important of these consistent themes is probably faith in God despite great peril, leading to ultimate victory. They also lack a strong emphasis on romance (with some partial exceptions), which is a key difference between Acts and the GraecoRoman novel. 69. Philips, ‘The Genre of Acts’, p.370. 70. Porter, The Paul of Acts, p.15. 71. Richard I. Pervo, ‘Direct Speech in Acts and the Question of Genre’, JSNT 28 (2006), p.288. 72. Several long speeches help Catiline reach this ¿gure. 73. Pervo, ‘Direct Speech in Acts’, p.301.

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Lawrence M. Wills divides Jewish novelistic literature into three groups: 1. 2.

3.

National hero novellas: rousing adventure stories which champion the exploits of the ancient heroes of the Jews, the best preserved example probably being by Artapanus in about 200 BCE. Novellas that treat ¿gures who were unimportant or unknown to Jewish history, or are depicted in such a way that their historicity is patently unbelievable. This would include Esther, Daniel, Tobit, Aseneth and Judith.74 They present a semblance of historical verisimilitude to create atmosphere, but nevertheless contain incorrect and patently unbelievable historical ¿gures. Wills thinks these texts were likely read as ¿ctions, or in some cases, satires or farces. Historical Novellas, which treat historical ¿gures from the recent past in a way that, however implausible to us, was probably received as factually true, such as 3 Maccabees, and the Tobiad Romance and Royal Family of Adiabene contained in Josephus’ Antiquities.75

The most likely category for Acts is the last, if only because it deals with ‘historical ¿gures from the recent past’. According to Wills’ classi¿cations, this also means that the target audience could have received it as ‘factually true’. Thus the historical element of Acts, on this understanding at least, would be taken quite seriously without trying to slot Acts into an explicitly historiographical genre. Such a hypothesis incorporates the apologetic elements of Sterling’s analysis with more narratival and entertainment-based elements – the novellas did focus strongly on individual ¿gures (Bios) and the heroic ideology owes something to epic. As Wills comments, ‘The Jewish novellas constitute perhaps our best laboratory for discerning the process by which indigenous narratives of various kinds were transformed into popular literature’.76 Approached from another angle, one might say that they show us how ideological frameworks similar to that of Josephus were expounded in the realm of popular narrative. Pervo, writing before Wills, makes a more general statement about the Jewish novellas which does not fully account for the ¿ctional works:

74. More detail on the patent lack of historicity in these texts can be found in Johnson, Historical Fictions, pp.9–55. 75. Wills, ‘The Jewish Novellas’, pp.223–4. 76. Wills, ‘The Jewish Novellas’, p.225. 1

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles Jewish novelists did not invent their characters. They elaborated ¿gures and events from myth, legend, Scripture, and history. The writers of historical ¿ction took pains to emulate both their own and Greek historians. As in the case of Luke, it is not valid to insist that the authors were either telling the truth or engaging in deceit. Comparative analysis leads to the conclusion that their devices were employed, as by Chariton, for example, to create verisimilitude.77

This statement does not hold very well for Tobit, or even Judith, but is applicable in the case of the Daniel novellas, the Josephus novellas, and 2 and 3 Maccabees, as well as the biblical rewrite of Artapanus, Joseph and Aseneth, and even Esther, at least to some degree.78 There is in general a stronger urge to historical verisimilitude in the Jewish Novellas than the Greek novels, though there is also a comic tendency (Susannah, Esther, Tobit)79 that seems to come in inverse relation to historicity. Analysis of the relationship between Acts and the Jewish Novella is, however, signi¿cantly compromised by the process of Hellenisation that was well under way in the Jewish literary milieu. Application of the sort of intertextual relations between Jewish and Greek history that Sterling discusses cross over easily into the realm of the novel.80 By the time sexuality becomes a factor, as in the case of Susannah, or more obviously, Joseph and Aseneth, the boundary between the two is quite blurred. Nonetheless, Jewish novellas are always explicit about their religious orientation, and are to some extent stylistically Septuagintal – in both of these respects Acts can be seen as belonging among them. Given their common traits, it is somewhat surprising that more work has not been done on the comparison between Acts and this genre, but the fact is that very little secondary literature makes use of the Jewish novella for interpreting Acts.81 77. Pervo, Pro¿t with Delight, p.120. 78. Esther claims to account for the festival of Purim. 79. David McCracken, ‘Narration and Comedy in the Book of Tobit’, JBL 114, no. 3 (1995), pp.401–18; Wills, ‘The Jewish Novellas’, p.227. See Chapter 7 of this study for a more thorough discussion of the comic element. 80. Sterling, Historiography and Self-de¿nition; Pervo, Pro¿t with Delight, p.121. 81. Among the better scholars in this regard are D. P. Bechard, Paul Outside the Walls: A Study of Luke’s Socio-geographical Universalism in Acts 14:8-20 (Rome: Ponti¿cio Istituto Biblico, 2000), p.493, and Rick Strelan, Strange Acts: Studies in the Cultural World of the Acts of the Apostles (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), pp.492–3. Rothschild, Luke–Acts and the Rhetoric of History, is among the worst, for she rebuts Pervo quite passionately in half a dozen locations without citing much Jewish literature outside of Josephus.

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III. Pick a Box, Any Box: The Options So Far The options outlined above all have merits – but that very fact tells against them. If ¿rm boundaries exist between genres then the presence of two or more in any signi¿cant measure does not represent interpretative data but a problem to be solved. Genre as classi¿cation is restrictive. In the introduction to his 2002 monograph Pauline Christianity: Luke– Acts and the Legacy of Paul,82 Christopher Mount brieÀy surveys the issue of genre, before launching into some extraordinarily perceptive criticisms of the methodologies surrounding genre-studies in Acts. Speaking of Talbert’s83 hypothesis (the philosophical Bios), he says: He achieves this result using a method of comparison that selectively de¿nes certain similarities (with some biographies in Diogenes Laertius over against similarities with Mk) and suppresses differences (for example, concerning the speeches in Acts): his similarities are ‘remarkable’; any differences are ‘not decisive’.84

Mount goes on to observe that ‘while Talbert’s conclusions have not been widely accepted, this methodological procedure has been repeated to establish virtually every genre identi¿cation proposed for the gospels in general and Lk–Acts in particular…’ He then demonstrates this with examples from several scholars,85 and suggests that ‘The proposed comparisons (genre identi¿cations) rhetorically and methodologically de¿ne certain similarities over against differences in an arbitrary manner to establish the proposed genre’.86

82. Mount, Pauline Christianity, pp.59–68. 83. To be fair to Talbert, Literary Patterns, pp.132–3, he was unfortunate in that he was educated in an era very different from our own in terms of genre and literary theory. His willingness to take the problem on was, and remains, admirably brave. 84. Mount, Pauline Christianity, p.64; Talbert, Literary Patterns, pp.132–3. In this he aligns himself with modern genre theory, but this will be discussed in the next chapter. 85. Although in the case of MacDonald his criticism comes shortly before the publication of Does the New Testament Imitate Homer, which is much more congenial to his ideas, and in the case of Pervo, his criticisms are, at least in my opinion, unfair. I have always understood Pervo’s point to be that Acts has more in common with the novel than with historiography, but that the resemblances are often ignored for reasons of piety. He then highlights the similarities. Pervo never, as far as I recall, argues that Acts is a novel. ‘My intent is that such investigation [of the relevance of the novel for interpreting Acts] proceed alongside, as well as in competition with, historiographical models’. Pervo, Pro¿t in Delight, p.137. 86. Mount, Pauline Christianity, p.64.

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Mount’s point highlights a fundamental problem of method in the study of Acts’ genre: the ill-de¿ned methodology on which the search for the genre of Acts is based is essentially a binary method of classi¿cation which only serves to suppress ‘other possible generic con¿gurations of similarities and differences’ because it relies upon ‘an inadequate approach to comparison’.87 Mount would rather use more speci¿c terminology, such as ‘X resembles Y more than Z with respect to V’. ‘Comparison is always partial, relative, and determined by the interests of the observer’.88 He goes on: Although the debate about the genre of Lk–Acts has been characterized by an unsuccessful attempt to discover a de¿nitive point of similarity or difference to determine comparison, this search for the genre of Lk–Acts has illuminated the complexity of the literary relations of Lk–Acts, a complexity that scholars have relentlessly minimized. The various comparisons (with historiography, biography, novel, gospel traditions) suggest oral and literary traditions within which the author was writing and placing his work, traditions that are important indications of the social and literary (and thus interpretative) matrix within which Lk–Acts belongs.89

Taking this statement seriously means problematising an already dif¿cult research ¿eld, and might suggest the abandonment of the whole enterprise. Indeed, this is exactly what Mount does – refuses to pursue the search for the genre of Luke–Acts.90 Mount’s comments on the genre of Acts (or in his case, Luke–Acts), while covering only a few pages, are extraordinarily insightful. Most important is his frank assessment of the methodology applied, as well as some tantalising comments about intertextuality and its role in creating generic expectations.91 He does not use the term ‘binary classi¿cation’, which is the one I want to use to discuss the typical scholarly approach to genre, but in essence he advocates moving away from a binary system into something with more Àuid boundaries. This search for the Genre of Acts (or Luke–Acts) has involved many suggestions, and none of them are without merit. This appears to create a ‘pick a box, any box’ situation. But even a small amount of reÀection 87. Mount, Pauline Christianity, p.65. 88. Mount, Pauline Christianity, p.65. 89. Mount, Pauline Christianity, p.67. My italics. 90. Mount, Pauline Christianity, p.67. He is not alone. Penner, ‘Contextualizing Acts’, pp.14–15, admits to wanting to skirt the issue as unhelpful; Derrida, ‘The Law of Genre’, questions the entire enterprise of generic classi¿cation. 91. Comments I am sorry he does not pursue. Mount, Pauline Christianity, pp.68–9.

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on that theoretical stance shows that it could never be adopted at a pragmatic level. The reader, using this idea, is supposed to say to herself ‘Luke–Acts is a philosophical Bios’ and read accordingly, minimising any features that are clearly not part of that genre, or are discordant with it. While most scholars acknowledge Àexibility within a genre, there is simply no way to tell whether a text is Bios containing elements of epic or epic containing elements of Bios. This is a matter of importance. In reality, one might use Talbert’s hypothesis to explore the successional elements of Acts, but must also acknowledge Acts’ apparent lack of interest in biography for its own sake. One might note historical but non-biographical information (such as the institutional elements early in Acts, or the history of Jewish relations that ¿gures in the life of all three protagonists), but must also accept the strong focus on individual characters throughout both Luke and Acts. Sterling’s suggestion signi¿cantly improves our understanding of Acts’ as Jewish writing in a Hellenised context, and MacDonald’s exploration of Homeric parallels highlights what Luke shared with Greek literary history. The notion that one of these proposals must be accepted over and against another is counter-productive – all can be fruitfully used to understand elements of Acts, and together, they can illuminate the whole.

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Chapter 3

THE THEORY OF GENRE

I. Introduction In the last chapter the most important proposals for the genre of Acts were brieÀy analysed. In the conclusion I raised concerns about both the methodological approach to generic classi¿cation and about the possible bene¿ts of any consensus that might come about. In this chapter I want to develop a methodological strategy which advances interpretation while avoiding a rigidity too inÀexible to cope with the precarious nature of genre.1 Genre and literary theory require methodological clarity if they are to avoid the accusation of subjectivity, but this requirement must be balanced against the warning of F. Scott Spencer: Modern literary theory has its own complex jargon and method of argumentation which can quickly weary even the most diligent student in search of practical aids to understanding the biblical text. The burden is on the biblical critic informed by secular literary theory to demonstrate clearly and succinctly how such theory enhances comprehension of the biblical message. It is frustrating to wade through some heavy discussion of literary methodology to arrive at a few pages of application to biblical study which reveal nothing that could not have also been deduced by more conventional means.2

I take this advice very seriously – any methodology developed here must be helpful, which means pragmatic and workable. This chapter aims to steer between the Scylla of methodological madness and the Charybdis of failing to convince. I de¿ne a good method as one that is both simple and effective.

1. Byrskog, ‘History or Story?’, p.283. 2. Spencer, ‘Modern Literary Approaches’, p.412; Charles H. Talbert, ‘Review of Robert Tannehill, The Narrative Unity of Luke–Acts: A Literary Interpretation. Volume One: The Gospel According to Luke’, Biblia 69 (1988), p.138.

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Biblical critics have not yet come fully to terms with genre theory, which is immensely complicated and particularly Àuid in nature. Secular theorists, of course, have at least nearly as much trouble; advances in recent years have come mainly from the surrendering of ideas about ¿xed structures and an acceptance of dialogue between genres. In this chapter it is not only genre but narrative and cognitive theory (the latter is becoming more and more important in understanding genre) that are brought in to the discussion. Any discussion about genre within biblical studies needs to begin with two primary objectives. The ¿rst is to move away from a prescriptive approach to genre toward a more Àexible model (while avoiding so much Àexibility that it becomes pointless). The second is to establish how genre enables and assists communication in literature. In my opinion, any study of biblical narrative that does not ¿rst resolve these two problems cannot hope to make effective progress. II. Genre, Classi¿cation, Hybridity When looking at the main suggestions for the genre of Acts, the most striking observation is that most of them do have a basis in the literature of the period – suggesting that Acts could claim commonality with several genres. Thomas E. Philips, looking at this problem, concludes that a consensus is growing which sees Acts ‘as a history, but one that contains ¿ctional elements’.3 This consensus is perhaps an awkward one, but it is a begrudging acknowledgment of generic hybridity. Acts scholarship is ¿nding in practice what genre theorists have established in principle – that ¿xed genre categories have very limited use for interpreting texts. A consensus of hybridity does not necessarily allow interpretation to progress any further. The most widespread but implicit hope appears to be that a de¿nitive answer in regard to genre will provide validation for the truth-value of the biblical narrative. In Gregory Sterling’s discussion on genre and historiography, he argues that genre is more important than this sort of validation, and quotes E. D. Hirsh in support, who says: ‘An interpreter’s preliminary generic conception of a text is constitutive of everything that he/she subsequently understands’.4 On this basis Sterling 3. Philips, ‘The Genre of Acts’, p.385. That this can be said for most genres has been observed since the formalists. See for example, Boris Eichenbaum, ‘Introduction to the Formal Method’, in Rivkin and Ryan, eds., Literary Theory, pp.8–16. 4. Sterling, Historiography and Self-de¿nition, p.16; Eric Donald Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967), p.74. 1

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argues: ‘The signi¿cance of this claim is that it makes genre an indispensable aspect of interpretation’.5 The trouble with this is that in practice, the quest for the genre of Acts actually seems to hinder interpretation by making a critic invested in one (or two or three) genres maximise some features and minimise others. Persevering with a binary model actively prevents us from utilising this ‘indispensable aspect of interpretation’.6 A partial exception is Richard Burridge, who discusses the purpose of genres for six pages but whose conclusion does not escape a certain prescriptivism. His vacillation between Àuidity and rigidity seems confused at times, but seems ultimately to argue for a more complex kind of classi¿cation than was commonly used at the time he was writing. It would appear, however, that this system would remain one of rigid boundaries.7 Burridge’s approach is certainly ahead of many others. Many scholars adhere to a principle of binary classi¿cation that is intolerant of divergence from what is considered the correct taxonomy. Mark Edwards sums this up nicely when he says that: During the last few decades it has become almost a dogma in some quarters that every work of Greek or Latin literature was written in conformity with certain rigid precepts, known to the audience of the time but obscure to us, and that therefore the initial task for a critic of the Gospels is to assign them to a genre and learn its rules.8

This tendency is evident everywhere in biblical studies. For example, despite cataloguing many features, Burridge is not prescriptive enough for Adela Yarbro Collins, who states: Burridge acknowledges the lack of clear ancient criteria for de¿ning a bios by attempting to de¿ne the genre inductively, using a list of generic features derived from modern literary criticism. He has chosen generic features that are likely to reveal the particular pattern for each genre that constitutes the ‘contract’ between author and reader. These include opening features (title, opening words, prologue, or preface), subject (i.e., 5. Sterling, Historiography and Self-de¿nition, p.16. 6. A promising collection of essays has recently appeared in Boer (ed.), Bakhtin and Genre Theory in Biblical Studies. Binary classi¿cation is a prominent idea in this collection. 7. Burridge, What Are the Gospels?, p.38; this reductionistic tendency is also evident in Burridge’s more recent work. See for example, Burridge, ‘Reading the Gospels as Biography’, in which other proposals are considered to be either right or wrong (p.33 n.7), but generic dialogue with the biographical genre is considered as ample evidence for classi¿cation (pp.32, 33, 42). 8. Edwards, ‘Gospel and Genre’, pp.51–3. 1

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subject matter or content), external features (mode of representation, meter, size or length, structure or sequence, scale, sources, methods of characterization), and internal features (setting, topics, style, tone, mood, attitude, values, quality of characterization, social setting, occasion of writing, author’s intention or purpose).9

But then goes on to complain: Burridge is surely correct in taking the position that the last centuries B.C.E. and the ¿rst century C.E. was a time of Àexible genres. But if our goal is the interpretation of texts, it is not helpful to stay at that level of generality. Although it is a necessary corrective to an unrealistically rigid notion of genre as a set of pigeonholes, an emphasis on Àexible boundaries and ‘crossings’ between genres and overlapping circles of genera proxima does not illuminate what is distinctive about particular genres.10

Richard Pervo is arguably even less prescriptive than Burridge in his 1986 monograph Pro¿t with Delight, in which he does not attempt so much to classify as to compare. Stanley E. Porter is a recent critic: The most telling [logical and literary problem] is perhaps Pervo’s failure to identify the book of Acts with either historical writing or the ancient novel. Such a mixed genre as he posits does not appear to have been a recognized genre of the Greco-Roman World. Pervo is quick to point out what he sees as parallels in Acts and ancient novels – such as imprisonments, shipwrecks, travel narrative, and various humorous and lighthearted elements – all of which are paralleled in both ¿ctional and historical texts of the ancient world, but that do not necessarily imply confusion in the use made of them.11

Porter works on the assumption that a mixed genre is an impossibility: if Acts is to be considered a novel, there is the problem of history; if history, the problem of the novel. Pervo’s refusal to categorise Acts in what he considers appropriately prescriptive terms is seen as a failure that leaves his thesis open to criticism. Yet genre theorists have moved away from such rigidity in recent years. One might quote Mark Salber Philips, who says: Considered as frameworks of communication, genres can neither be ¿xed nor autonomous. Rather, their identities are always interrelated with those of other genres, so that contrast and combination are a key feature of the way genres develop and change. Genres, to put this differently, are necessarily responsive to each other as well as to the social conditions that 9. Adela Yarbro Collins, ‘Review: Genre and the Gospels’, JR 75, no. 2 (1995), p.240. 10. Collins, ‘Review: Genre and the Gospels’, p.240. 11. Porter, The Paul of Acts, p.15.

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles frame them. In this way, they form larger groupings or systems, which are themselves historically conditioned and variable. Accordingly, as authors innovate and the conditions of knowledge and communication change over time, genres undergo a process of revision that registers new relations of authors, readers, and disciplines.12

If Philips is right in this, any critical process which rules texts out of the interpretative process on principle is likely to be a hindrance: the only way de¿nitively to rule out the inÀuence of one text on another is to establish beyond doubt that it was written after the text in question—and this, as biblical scholars have learnt, is not an easy task. If each and every prior narrative can contain data about the interpretative strategies available to contemporary readers, the available resources are so enormous as to risk making selection impossible. Genres are one way that readers narrow the range of available options and receive initial indicators about what they can expect a text to do. As an example of this, one of Porter’s criticisms of Pervo relates to his description of the novel as having a predictable outcome.13 Porter argues that the outcome of Acts is not predictable in the way that the ancient romances are; in his view this proves the error in Pervo’s hypothesis.14 But such a reading depends on what the reader expects: if one reads a novel as a history, it is natural that they will interpret it badly and fail properly to follow the codes laid down by the author; likewise, if one reads a history as a novel, it is always likely to disappoint.15 Right across the criticisms of Pervo the same problem occurs. David Balch’s argument is that this genre, as well as Talbert’s bios, would make the focus of Acts the individual, rather than the sort of universal, political concerns that he considers central to Acts.16 The problem could just as easily be looked at from the opposite perspective – if one thinks Acts is about the development of an institution as Cancik does (see above), other important elements have to be minimised. Expectations about the communication dictate its success, so readers merely need to formulate the correct expectations. Unfortunately, literary artists have always taken great pleasure in toying with those expectations and subverting them to create new artistic effects. 12. Phillips, ‘Histories, Micro- and Literary’, p.212. 13. To read Pervo’s description of the novel see Pervo, Pro¿t with Delight, pp.104–14. 14. Porter, The Paul of Acts, p.16. 15. This is a point that I prove in the second half of this book, where the readings of Acts show how the target audience would organise the text. 16. Balch, ‘Jesus as Founder’. See also Palmer-Bonz, The Past as Legacy, p.13, who criticises Balch on similar grounds.

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a. Pure Forms and Popular Texts As noted in the previous chapter, Acts has occasionally been called a popular text;17 a hypothesis which is signi¿cant and underrated. In the aftermath of Pro¿t with Delight, Pervo has maintained this idea: In the Greco-Roman world, genre was intimately bound up with style and, to a large degree, with content. Among items that distinguish Luke and Acts from learned historiography are the persistent use of an omniscient narrator, the volume of dialogue and direct speech, techniques of plotting and structure, the quantity of entertaining narrative, limitations of style, the nature of the subject, and the presence of what I describe as ‘¿ction’. These are compelling reasons for including more ‘popular’ texts on the menu of works to be compared with Luke and Acts. There is another: popular texts were much less likely to be concerned with the ¿ne points of generic distinction than were more sophisticated literary compositions.18

The idea behind both Porter’s criticisms of Pervo and many of the genre proposals for Acts is that of the pure generic form. Certainly, such a notion has a basis in the practice of ancient writers, who looked always to ‘a few unchanging models of acknowledged mastery’.19 At the same time, John Marincola, who makes this statement, also makes it clear that innovation and individuality were fundamental to good style.20 Modern scholars question not only the extent to which such rigidity was observed by ancients, but even whether it was primarily a literary observation at all. Hayden White thinks that ‘generic purity is a supreme value among aristocratic, conservative, and reactionary social groups and political parties’.21 Mikhail Bakhtin observes that pure generic forms are primarily a social construct: Novelistic discourse is a poetic discourse, but one that does not ¿t within the frame provided by the concept of poetic discourse as it now exists. This concept has certain underlying presuppositions that limit it. The very concept – in the course of its historical formation from Aristotle to the present day – has been oriented toward the speci¿c ‘of¿cial’ genres and 17. Cadbury, The Making of Luke–Acts, pp.133–4, has made suggestions of this nature, as has been noted. Even David Balch, ‘Jesus as Founder’, p.143, links Asian historiography with a populist tendency and implies that this is important for his reading of Acts. 18. Richard I. Pervo, ‘Israel’s Heritage and Claims Upon the Genre(s) of Luke and Acts’, in Moessner, ed., Jesus and the Heritage of Israel, p.135. 19. John Marincola, Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p.12. 20. Marincola, Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography, p.14. 21. Hayden White, ‘The Narrativization of Real Events’, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 4 (1981), p.69.

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles connected with speci¿c historical tendencies in verbal ideological life. Thus a whole series of phenomena remained beyond its conceptual horizon.22

Of course, the period in which Acts was written was far closer to Aristotle than we are today, and traced much of its literary culture directly back to ancient Athens. In that epoch, pure forms such as tragedy, comedy, epic and history were considered immutable and eternal. This is something that Daniel Selden discusses in the context of the Greek Novel: Plato is adamant about one thing: literary kinds must remain distinct and, in fact, the mixture of genres serves the Athenian Stranger as the principal paradigm for political degeneration… Long after the different genres ceased to be occasional and to ful¿l speci¿c social functions, they continued to bear the marks of status, class, ethnicity, and gender, and for writers to uphold the propriety of these distinctions was felt implicitly to validate a social order. In this case, theory stands in dialectical relation to authorial practice. The hybridization of which Plato complains in the Laws was already fact…23

If Acts was indeed intended as a popular text, a ¿xed and formal generic categorisation was not necessarily its aspiration. If this is the case, any attempt to place it in a single category is Àawed from the outset. This does not mean that Acts cannot be seen as history – as we saw in the previous chapter, the elevation of the history genre above the level of popular style is something that in and of itself rests on a misconception. This problem is further exacerbated by the multiplicity of styles available in this social context: the Jewish ¿ctions generally called ‘Jewish Romances’ or ‘Jewish Novels’ are probably identi¿ed as such because of a certain popular character, but they present a very different style of narrative to that of their Greek counterparts.24 The popular text is de¿ned by its appeal to a broad audience,25 and by de¿nition reaches beyond the con¿nes of a socially elite readership, 22. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p.269. 23. Daniel Selden, ‘Genre of Genre’, in The Search for the Ancient Novel (ed. James Tatum; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), pp.40–1. One might also add that Rothschild, Luke–Acts and the Rhetoric of History, p.95, argues that Hellenistic historians were using techniques and styles from epic, tragedy and scienti¿c approaches. 24. On this problem see Johnson, Historical Fictions, pp.1–34. 25. Pervo, ‘Direct Speech in Acts’, p.303, argues that popular does not refer to a mass market, but to ‘less demanding and more enjoyable compositions’. I both agree and disagree with him – the popular text was not read by everyone, but could be read by anyone (at least, anyone that could read and had access to the texts).

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giving it greater potential for poetic licence. This is not to say that popular literature was intentionally subversive – but ideological relations of cultural power create a hierarchy of restriction: the ideology of the group who bene¿ts most from the current state of affairs is seldom interested in new and radical change. Having said this, it must be added that even among ¿rst-rate ancient authors, subversion of genre was a normal and useful activity. Burridge cites R. K. Hack: ‘Horace, the perfect artist, was a desperate mixer of genres’. Furthermore, the best of his poems are the very ones which break the rules: the validity of the laws ‘is in inverse ratio to the originality and personal merit of the poems’. So a contradiction emerges where ‘the laws of the lyric genre upheld by Horace the critic are de¿nitely annulled by Horace the poet’.26

If genre can be routinely subverted even by those ¿rst-class poets who were engaged in enforcing generic boundaries through their criticism,27 it can be reliably inferred that at least some of those authors who, so far as can be known, had no interest in criticism, were willing to disregard propriety whenever it suited them. For Acts, this might mean that generic boundaries are merely an expensive myth that restricts resources and limits interpretation of the text. b. The Process of Generic Change If genre is part of the author’s communicative strategy, it follows not only that its use will affect the nature of the communication, but that the nature of the communication affects the use of genre. Two communicative priorities that are always instrumental in generic change are particularly important – the inevitable loss of communicative ef¿cacy through stagnation, and the continual change in what needs to be communicated. Formalist Yury Tynyanov looks at the way in which devices lose and renew their communicative ef¿cacy. As the features of a successful genre become more familiar, the genre becomes more automatised. Automatisation is the process by which a genre develops more and more ¿xed features; as this happens, genres ‘lose their potency and cease to be perceived as artistic entities as a result of formulaic repetition and overfamiliarity’.28 This process in turn leads to canonisation, which is 26. Burridge, What Are the Gospels?, p.57; R. K. Hack, ‘The Doctrine of Literary Forms’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 27 (1916), pp.30–2. 27. Depew, ‘Genre, Occasion, and Imitation’, presents several good examples of Callimachus’ willingness to break generic convention. 28. Duff, ed., Modern Genre Theory, p.x.

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles the process whereby a genre acquires cultural recognition or prestige through inclusion within a select list or ‘canon’ of highly valued genres… this being another form of automatisation, and the price of of¿cial acceptance being the loss of a genre’s subversive potential.29

This process of automatisation naturally creates strong and familiar conventions whose subversion leads inevitably to new genres: every new genre is a subversion of existing ones. The process of defamiliarisation, which enables art to create poetic effects, is made possible only because the static features formed by the developing genre create expectations that can then be manipulated: ‘given that the principle is preserved, the construction can be dislocated endlessly: the lofty poema can be replaced by the frivolous tale, the noble hero by a prosaic hero…’30 Tynyanov describes a four step process: (1) An opposing constructive principle takes shape in dialectical relationship to an automatised principle of construction; (2) it is then applied – the constructive principle seeks out the readiest ¿eld of application; (3) it spreads over the greatest mass of phenomena; (4) it becomes automatised and gives rise to opposing principles of construction.31

Seen in this way, generic mutation is absolutely inevitable, but also derives its meaning not in isolation, but in dialogue with the constructive principle against which it was created: The whole point of a new construction may be in the new use to which old devices are put, in their new constructive signi¿cance, and this is just what is overlooked if we adopt a ‘static’ approach.32

Ireneusz Opacki, a Polish literary theorist, focuses not just on the power struggles that lead to the overthrow of old, automatised traits, but also on the adoption of successful and dominant traits. To Opacki, the subversion of generic traits is only one of several ways in which new works absorb elements of the most successful contemporary genres. These successful genres, which he calls ‘royal genres’, achieve their status by successfully speaking into new social situations. There is a necessary link between literary elements and ‘a completely new set of problems introduced by a given stage of history’:33

29. 30. p.32. 31. 32. 33.

1

Duff, Modern Genre Theory, p.x. Yury Tynyanov, ‘The Literary Fact’, in Duff, ed., Modern Genre Theory, Tynyanov, ‘The Literary Fact’, p.38. Tynyanov, ‘The Literary Fact’, p.35, his italics. Ireneusz Opacki, ‘Royal Genres’, in Duff, ed., Modern Genre Theory, p.119.

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Every literary trend – or a phase of it – has underlying it certain de¿ned socio-historical factors, which shape a speci¿c attitude towards the world and a certain sphere of interests and problems. In turn, this brings with it the creation of a speci¿c system of poetics, an ensemble of means of expression, of ways of structurally linking them, which – growing out of the ‘extraliterary’ environment of the trend – carry in them historically speci¿c meanings and functions.34

Opacki explains this with a simple model. If the Royal genre has for its constituent features a b C D E f, with C D E as its principal components, then an earlier genre, reforming itself in the light of the new, might move from a k l M N O p form to a b c M N O d form (for example), adopting successful aspects of the new, successful genre to reinvent itself. These insights are notable in that they are fundamentally against the idea that genres can be ¿xed and permanent. Just as importantly, they suggest that authors integrate the most effective communicative strategies into their own, or subvert (by parody, for example) a generic trait that has ceased to be ef¿cacious. In both of these respects, genre is dialogical, and cannot be usefully squeezed into a binary mould that sees each genre as distinct. III. Genre, Conventions, Expectations35 It should be evident by now that intertextuality is critical to genre theory – all similarity and difference is actually relational, whether directly or indirectly, as texts make use of texts that have made use of texts that have made use of texts. The binary logic that rules one text in and another out is a necessary element of critical thinking – the process of classi¿cation is fundamental to any quanti¿able insight that wants to move beyond the purely theoretical.36 But the scholar of literature must bear in mind that such classi¿cations limit and demarcate between texts in an arti¿cial manner, enabling criticism through reductive means. Richard Walsh has explored the conception often expressed by writers that they are not creating things newly but ‘mediating a pre-existing story’ in ¿ctional narrative – manifestly untrue as it is, the idea is a 34. Opacki, ‘Royal Genres’, p.119. 35. So far it has been argued that culture and intertexts are essential to literary interpretation. In this section, though, I want to focus ¿rmly on genre’s literary relations, mainly for the sake of simplicity. 36. Adena Rosmarin, Power of Genre (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp.21–2; Newsom, ‘Spying Out the Land’, p.21. 1

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common one.37 Wanting to come to terms with the author as creator of a story who simultaneously perceives him- or herself as ‘medium’ of the text, he concludes: The authority to which ¿ctional narratives appeal may be cast in [terms of verisimilitude], and it is certainly a function of truth. But the truth with which they are concerned is not grounded in correspondence. Fundamentally, it is less a matter of any kind of representational accuracy than an appeal to a speci¿cally narrative rightness. This sense of narrative rightness has to do with the concord between the story in hand and other, prior narratives, not ultimately in the sense of a relation to sources, to a tradition, or even to a given set of narrative conventions, but rather to a way of meaning or of understanding – a rhetoric, but one with cultural roots so deep that it effectively usurps the authority of logic.38

Above it was claimed that genre dictates expectations, but here Walsh takes it further, and claims that readers rely on prior narratives and the conventions they have laid down as a resource for decoding an unfamiliar text. This is part of a system that compensates for the impossibility of informational saturation: the information conveyed in a narrative is that which the author considers most pertinent, a principle that dictates an expectation of relevance in the reader, who expects words, phrases and allusions with which he is familiar to work in the ways in which he is accustomed. This creates a ‘logic’ that is distinctively narratival. Thus, ‘as soon as the man walked into the room I knew I couldn’t trust him’ is expected to have certain consequences, and the allegedly untrustworthy character is expected to do something untrustworthy at some point. This is clearly not a real-world principle – in the real world we might declare our trust or distrust for someone and nothing may ever come of it; but the contract between author and reader of ¿ction dictates that if the information is included, it must be relevant. This would be true even when it works the other way – Jane Austen and Wilkie Collins both demonstrate in their novels the power of the red herring, and manage to leave readers highly suspicious of any character who is apparently without fault. The expectation of relevance combines with the conventions of literature to create a system of conventions and precedents. In a form of communication that does not allow for the receiver to check and validate his interpretation of the message, this is a valuable way to increase the reference points by which it can be decoded. Alastair Fowler calls this principle ‘redundancy’:

1

37. Walsh, Rhetoric of Fictionality, pp.130–2. 38. Walsh, Rhetoric of Fictionality, p.146.

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Now we know that a unidirectional link, since it offers no chance for questions or corrections, calls for increased ‘redundancy’ in the message. By redundancy – a somewhat misleading term – is meant that property of communication systems ‘which arises from a superÀuity of rules, and which facilitates communication in spite of all the factors of uncertainty acting against it’.39

Genre is one of these properties: a reader sees generic patterns in a text and organises his expectations accordingly. In this sense, genre is one of the earliest available indicators as to what prior narratives should be used to decode the text, allowing the reader to narrow the range of appropriate intertextual frameworks for the text in hand: a reader knows what to expect from an Agatha Christie novel before they have read a single line. a. Intertextual Signposting, the Expectation of Relevance and the Cognitive Environment Whatever level of coherence an individual narrative might achieve, readers are obliged to con¿gure texts with the expectation of full coherence: any other expectation would make the con¿gurative process impossible because there would be no way to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant data. Prior narratives (intertexts) operate as tools in searching for this relevance by providing a bank of conventions and codes – signposts by which to navigate the story. Recent cognitive theory both supports and nuances this idea by suggesting that people unconsciously assume the relevance of a communication and seek out a context which maximises that relevance. The human mind is such that ‘every act of ostensive communication communicates the presumption of its own optimal relevance’.40 It is not that ¿rst the context is determined, and then relevance is assessed. On the contrary, people hope that the assumption being processed is relevant (or else they would not bother to process it at all), and they try to select a context which will justify that hope: a context which will maximize relevance.41

Wilson and Sperber use several examples to illustrate this. Here is one: Alan asks Lisa if she would like to join him and his family for supper, and she replies: ‘No thanks, I’ve eaten’. Clearly, only context can supply the meaning of this sentence, which is not that she has eaten in her 39. Fowler, Kinds of Literature, p.21. 40. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, Relevance: Communication and Cognition (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p.158; cf. Walsh, Rhetoric of Fictionality, p.25. 41. Walsh, Rhetoric of Fictionality, p.25; cf. Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, p.142.

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lifetime, or that she has eaten a jelly bean, but that she has eaten to such an extent and within such a time frame that she does not desire another meal at this juncture.42 Likewise, Alan knows that this is what Lisa means because it is the easiest way to interpret her statement.43 Richard Walsh summarises as follows: Explicit language is not categorically privileged; nor, in fact, is it categorically distinct. Sperber and Wilson argue that the distinction between the explicit and implicit ‘content’ of an utterance, conventionally understood as a distinction between decoded assumptions and inferred assumptions, actually has an irreducibly relative aspect. Their claim is ‘that no assumption is simply decoded, and that the recovery of any assumption requires an element of inference’.44

The communicator of the message is ‘pointing’ to mutual elements of a ‘cognitive environment’: a range of shared suppositions, values, and ideas that allow Lisa to indicate her meaning to Alan. She assumes that he will know what she means by making her statement because people frequently do not have two meals in quick succession. It is the construction of this shared cognitive space that both facilitates and dictates the ef¿cacy of the communication. When author and reader share large aspects of their semiotic world, the creation of an appropriate cognitive environment is relatively simple. Wilson and Sperber go so far as to argue that: ‘The more information she leaves implicit, the greater the degree of mutual understanding she makes it manifest that she takes to exist between her and her hearer’.45 This is part of a narrative rapport, a rhetoric of mutuality that is more than a mere rule of communicative ef¿ciency. The importance of establishing mutuality through implicature increases the likelihood of a culturally distant reader losing the thread of the literary communication: an appropriate cognitive environment might actually be outside the imaginative range of such a reader, making it impossible to understand and decode the text with any degree of accuracy. If, for example, Alan and his family were for some reason unaware that having one meal might prevent you from wanting to eat another, Lisa’s communication would make no sense at all. In this setting, intertextuality is a term that covers mutually known cognitive elements – a vast resource of contextual frameworks that can 42. Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, ‘Truthfulness and Relevance’, Mind 111, no. 443 (2002), pp.606–7. 43. Sperber and Wilson, ‘Truthfulness and Relevance’, pp.605, 608. 44. Walsh, Rhetoric of Fictionality, pp.24–5; cf. Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, p.182. 45. Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, p.218.

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be used as tools to decode the text. The author can rely on the reader having access to these intertextual elements because they are diffuse: even when a certain text is not shared between author and reader, other texts employing similar strategies will be known by that reader, because they are broadly spread across a range of texts. The scale of this intertextual matrix is intimidating: effectively all prior texts contribute to the process of interpreting every subsequent text, sometimes in the tiniest ways. Jonathan Culler says: ‘we are faced with an in¿nite intertextuality where conventions and presuppositions cannot be traced to their source and thus positivistically identi¿ed’.46 Prior narratives form a large part of the mutuality between author and reader that contextualises the text in hand and allows communication to be effective. By alluding to other narratives, the author is effectively if unconsciously indicating to his reader that certain strategies are being, or are de¿nitely not being, employed. That is to say, yes, genre dictates a reader’s expectations, but no, this does not mean that a reader identi¿es a genre and then ceases to modify those expectations. b. Multicultural Literary Environments and Intertextual Dialogue The ongoing intertextual dialogue that creates generic mutation always and inevitably occurs in proportion to its available dialogue partners, which means that where exposure to other literary cultures is greater, the speed of mutation is invariably higher. In a local context with few competing literary cultures (as was the case in ancient Athens) the process is slower, and literature appears to be more stable. When, on the other hand, the literature of one culture is exposed to that of many others, the process is rapid and radical, shifting continually to assimilate, subvert, parody and emulate these new ideas – it is this context that Bakhtin sees as integral to the creation of the novel, suggesting in effect that novels are texts whose very essence is the playing of genres against each other.47 In a literary environment that contains the different works of multiple cultures, genres become both derivative and transformative of each other in a way that is socio-ideological as well as literary. This is evident in a work like Joseph and Aseneth, where individualism and erotic love moves from the Greek romance to the Jewish ‘Adventures of a Legendary Figure’ genre.48 46. Culler, ‘Presupposition and Intertextuality’, p.1382. 47. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’. 48. Such as the various stories about Moses, by Philo, Artapanus and Ezekiel. The Testament of Joseph and the books of 1 and 2 Maccabees are other examples of the ‘adventures of a legendary ¿gure’ genre. 1

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Hybridisation in Acts – interplay between intra-religious and interreligious polemic, for example – is manifest at the generic level in several ways. Apologetic-historical elements from the Jewish milieu are in dialogue with Greco-Roman apologetic elements: Jewish historiography in dialogue with Hellenistic historiography, the Jewish novel with the Greek novel. And neither is it merely Greek/Jewish dialogue, interesting as this is – there is also the Jewish novelistic style in interplay with the Septuagint, and no doubt with other ‘oriental’ ideas; Paul as prophet in dialogue with the Old Testament prophets (as well as the Greek philosophers); biographical elements with novelistic elements and so on. In the period in which Acts was composed, the Roman Empire had created an environment in which a very large number of different literary cultures were accessible. Richard Burridge49 and Joel B. Green have commented on the instability of genres in this period, and rightly so, but the observation says very little about the processes behind it. As well as a rich literary tradition of their own, Jews were engaging with the even richer literary traditions of the Greeks, and also coming to terms with Roman culture and literature. As well as these three major inÀuences, the colonised nations all had more or less inÀuential traditions of their own. Altogether, the multi-cultural world in which these authors lived gave them access to a plethora of literary inÀuences. The Greeks and Romans had themselves been immensely inÀuenced by this intercultural exchange, as is evident in the contemporary debates over the genre ‘Tragic History’50 (which Polybius famously laments), the Greek Romance (which Anderson thinks is of Eastern origin anyway)51 and even the Aeneid, which reÀects the massive inÀuence of Homer but also tragedy and other genres. c. Modern and Ancient Literary Styles52 If a text represents a dialogue between literary cultures, it is worth taking a moment to reÀect on what that dialogue might look like. This is a dif¿cult enterprise and one that is unlikely to catch the full range of 49. Burridge, What Are the Gospels?, pp.58–61. 50. F. W. Walbank, ‘History and Tragedy’, HZfAG 9, no. 2 (1960), pp.216–34. 51. Graham Anderson, Ancient Fiction: The Novel in the Graeco-Roman World (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1984), pp.26–7. 52. I ¿nd that in the ¿nal version of the following section, much direct reference to Bakhtin has been lost. I therefore want to make it clear at this point that all of the ideas expressed here originate to some extent with his work. See Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’.

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allusions inherent in an ancient text. In order to grasp the process involved, a good place to start might be the modern conventions for framing this dialogue. For this reason I take Irvine Welsh’s famous book Trainspotting as an example. The protagonist opens the novel with a famous monologue: Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose ¿xed-interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage…53

In these opening lines a range of social discourses are being pitted against one another in both complex intertextual dialogue and the unitary voice of a stylised speaker. ‘Choose life’ alludes to a genre of positivistic philosophies, charitable organisations and advertisements (‘Drugs: Just Say NO’, springs to mind, and this is of course particularly appropriate). While the ¿rst four ‘choices’ in combination bring the reader into a realm of serious social intercourse, of which at this point she has no reason to doubt the sincerity, by the end of the ¿fth sentence, irony is evident (‘Choose a fucking big television’). This introduces an antimaterialist, almost nihilistic tone that engages with the legacy of Marxism and represents a rejection of modern capitalism that demonstrates intellect and penetrating insight. The stylisation of coarse language suggests that identifying this (as yet undisclosed) speaker with academia would be inappropriate, and indeed, his discourse appears to exclude him from the very social milieu that might naturally be associated with such elevated philosophy – he rejects as pointless the material culture that he would need to accept if he were to achieve social parity with the probable audience. In short, Welsh represents multiple discourses in the language of a marginalised social ¿gure. This ¿gure’s multiple allusions to various spheres of philosophy and culture are used to present a highly subversive perspective of normative society. Welsh is problematising the received social image of what a heroin addict and criminal such as Renton should be and do, by pitting his ideological standpoint against the normative ideology of his target reader. Through the choices he makes about how he treats these different ideological codes, he manages to embrace the voice of a despised individual and defamiliarise normative social behaviour by looking at it through these alien eyes. This dialogical tension is present throughout

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53.

Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting (London: Vintage, 2010), p.1.

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the modern novel, and is easy to perceive (if only on an unconscious level) for a competent modern reader. Dickens makes use of it in all his characterisations (a particularly brilliant example is Mr Bumble in Oliver Twist); before him, Chaucer makes pervasive use of it in the Canterbury Tales, where The Nun’s Priest’s Tale ¿nds its principal humour through its incredible dullness and piety. The heritage of this style is so strong as to make any other style seem obscure (take for example, Seamus Healey’s translation of Beowulf). But whether a reader picking up Trainspotting in a thousand years’ time would be able to perceive any of its nuances is another matter. Marx, capitalism (and cynicism about it) and linguistic markers of social strati¿cation are all diachronic to differing extents, and could all conceivably disappear before our hypothetical archaeologist rediscovers Welsh’s novel in the thirty-¿rst century. Ancient prose style, particularly Greek style, was quite different in this regard. Mikhail Bakhtin delineates between two historical types of style and sheds light on the processes by which generic dialogue can be detected within both modern and ancient literature. What he calls ‘the ¿rst stylistic line’ is the style dominant in modern literary culture, described above in the example from Trainspotting. This style represents alien voices as themselves, that is, it gives them distinct accents, ideas and perspectives, detectable on the linguistic level. The dominant literary style in the ancient Greek milieu was rather different. This style brought alien genres and languages into its sphere but radically stylised them in line with its own literary consciousness. Bakhtin uses the Sophistic novel as his prime example of this style, which is Characterized by sharp and relentless stylization of all its material, that is, by a purely monologic – abstractly idealized-consistency of style. It is precisely these Sophistic novels, in fact, that express most fully the thematic and compositional nature of the novel as a genre in its ancient form.54

In this type of novel, heteroglossia forms the dialogising background to the text, but seldom enters the narrative directly;55 allusion to other texts and borrowing from other genres abounds, but the heteroglot voice as such is kept out of the narrative. Bakhtin uses the Sophistic novels as the classic example of this style, but it is so common in the Greek world that one could look almost anywhere, as a brief look at Heliodorus is suf¿cient to illustrate. In the ¿rst book, which opens with the pirates looking down upon the beach and seeing the protagonists, Chariclea sees them:

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54. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p.372. 55. Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, p.375.

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When she heard the noise around her, and their shadows before her eyes, she lifted herself up a little and looked back; but then at once stooped down again, no whit dismayed by the strange colour of their skin nor yet abashed to see the thieves in harness, but applying herself only to bind up his wounds that lay before her. Such is the force of earnest desire and true love; it despiseth all outward chances, be they pleasant or otherwise, only beholding that which it loveth, and thereabout bestoweth all diligence and travail. But when the thieves passed by and stood before her, and seemed as though they would enterprise somewhat, she lifted herself up again, and beholding them black and ill favoured said: — ‘If you be the spirits of those who are slain here, you trouble us wrongfully, for most of you were slain by your own hands: as for us, if we slew any, we did it but in our own defence to repel the violence which was proffered to my virginity’.56

This English translation manages to retain the unitary style of the narrative, which, even when Chariclea speaks, remains relatively unchanged. Dialogue in this text is manifest in the style, which alludes to Epic (as does beginning in medias res), but also more generally to socially elite modes of discourse; to the romance novel, as is evident from the lovers, the pirates, the mention of virginity and so on; to the tragic genre, as is clear from the overall image and particularly from the last line; and to several levels of philosophical discourse (spirits, Fortune, true love, stoicism, nobility in self-defence, etc.). None of this is intended to suggest that the two stylistic lines are mutually exclusive. The Satyricon, a Latin text that is only extant in fragmentary form, but which can be securely dated to the ¿rst century, appears to make use of style considered radical when used in the modern era by James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and (perhaps most similar to Petronius) J. P. Donleavy. Petronius’ stream-of-consciousness is not a pervasive element of his literary style, but is perhaps the most startling of his distinctly modern-feeling literary achievements. Anderson translates Sat. xli-xlvi; lviiif as follows: And listen, we’re going to have a great show at the festival in three days’ time. Not just a gladiatorial school, but most of them freedmen. Good old Titus has a big heart and a hot head. Whatever he’s got for us, it’ll be something anyway. For he and I are like that and I’m telling you he doesn’t mess about. He’s going to give us cold steel – and no escape. There’ll be butchery right in the middle of the arena so that the whole theatre can get a good view. And he’s got the lolly: his father left him thirty million. If it costs him four hundred thousand – so what? His fortune 56. Online: http://www.el¿nspell.com/HeliodorusBk1.html September 2011). 1

(accessed

25

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles won’t feel it, and he’ll go down in history. Right now he’s got some real Goliaths, and a woman riding a chariot – and Glyco’s steward thrown to the lions. But that’s just giving himself away. What’s the slave done, when the missus forced ’im? She should’ve been tossed by a bull: she’s only worth peeing into. But when you can’t beat the ass you beats the saddle…57

Petronius’ stylistic aberrations are, however, unique to comedy (and satire) in the Graeco-Roman milieu, which is perhaps the most natural place for them. Parodic stylisation is one of the most obvious reasons to impersonate the voice of another – Lucian does similar things with The Passing of Peregrinus.58 The fact that the heteroglot style appears to be largely restricted to comedy suggests that the technique is not highly developed in the Greco-Roman milieu. Hebrew prose style bears more similarities to our own modern style than does Graeco-Roman prose – as early as Samuel there are de¿nite indicators of its presence. Robert Alter says of the typical Old Testament author: He feels entirely free, one should remember, to invent interior monologue for his characters; to ascribe feeling, intention, or motive to them when he chooses; to supply a verbatim dialogue (and he is one of literature’s masters of dialogue) for occasions when no one but the actors themselves could have had exact knowledge of what was said.59

Hebrew prose is heavily based on dialogue,60 and Alter ¿nds several examples where heteroglot voices are represented artistically as themselves (the second stylistic line). Both Hannah’s conversation with Eli in 1 Samuel 1,61 and David’s conversation with Ahimelech in 1 Samuel 21 represent a priest who speaks ex Cathedra, but they have different stylisations for the other actor – David, terse, con¿dent, secretive; Hannah, humble, miserable, modest.62 Narrative reticence also plays its part in creating atmosphere and tension, with ambiguity an important tool for the biblical author. David’s early ambition is revealed, for example, not in any authorial declaration of his ambition, but in his asking again (after he has been told), ‘what will be done for the man who kills this Philistine?’63 57. Anderson, Ancient Fiction, p.71. 58. The English text is available online: http://www.tertullian.org/rpearse/lucian/ peregrinus.html (accessed 25 September 2011). 59. Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), p.35. 60. For a recent statistical analysis see Pervo, ‘Direct Speech in Acts’. 61. Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, p.85. 62. Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, p.71. 63. Alter, Art of Biblical Narrative, p.115.

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All of this would suggest that the Jewish and Greco-Roman literary styles were intrinsically different. The Jewish novellas, however, throw cold water on this potentially useful avenue of delineation. They take a different tack altogether, with little or no visible representation of characters as themselves, and no character development in anyone except possibly (if a reader was to be extremely generous) Aseneth. Instead, an ossi¿cation of certain types of character – the steadfast, faithful servant of God who, forced by injustice becomes a hero – is evident, and usually in a militaristic stance such as in Judith (where Judith kills Holofernes, and in the triumphant ending the Jews slaughter the escaping enemies), Esther (where Haman is hung and the Jews slaughter their would-be executioners), and 2 Maccabees (where thirty-¿ve thousand troops are killed and the head of Nicanor taken). The fading of the heteroglot voice combined with the ossi¿cation of character and plot are representative of a move away from Hebrew and into Graeco-Roman style. Taken as a whole, the style of Acts would have to be described as falling into the normal range of Graeco-Roman prose (though in Chapters 7 and 8 I highlight hints of a more heteroglot style similar to that of Petronius). This does not mean Luke has not made use of his Jewish heritage – it is quite evident that he has – but that the distinction between Jewish and Greek style is not clear enough to be useful for interpretation. The important consequence of this for the modern interpreter is that in Acts, as in other Graeco-Roman and Diasporic Jewish literature, the nature of its style is such that the presence of other texts is less evident than we are used to ¿nding, and therefore more dif¿cult to spot. IV. Generic Hybridisation in Interpretation The dialogue of so many literary and cultural perspectives in the Hellenistic milieu made rapid generic mutation inevitable, destabilising genres and making it quite natural for Luke to create his text from a composite of various literary elements, particularly given his multicultural heritage: Luke was af¿liated with the Septuagint (whether through Judaism or Christianity), and living in a city under Roman rule. This combination meant that his home city (wherever that was), his imperial conquerors (and their Hellenistic inÀuences) and Jewish/ Christian culture would have been competing inÀuences, along with the lesser inÀuences exerted by each of the cultures living within the Empire. Nor is the matter as simple as Luke picking from a range of literary options made available in the texts of other cultures: each element of 1

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each literary style would have carried an ideological freight related to the ideological status of its source-culture. Luke’s rejection or subversion of literary elements may have made just as strong a statement as his acceptance of others. Much of this dialogue is lost to us now, though some of the more obvious elements remain. In the New Testament, the most obvious example of intertextual dialogue is with the Septuagint, but every one of the attempts to place Acts within a certain genre highlights some form of intertextual dialogue with that genre. The existence of other genres and other texts within Acts is manifest both explicitly and implicitly, in citation but also allusion, and the relative strength of these different presences is what gives the appearance of strength and weight to the various attempts to classify the genre of Acts. Taking the epic genre as an example, it is immediately evident that Acts is in some form of dialogue with that genre, simply because it is so pervasively inÀuential that it is impossible for a narrative of this period not to be: both narrative and social codes are founded upon Homer. Precisely because of this, even a strong relationship between Acts and that genre does little to assist classi¿cation. Instead, one should pay careful attention to Homeric allusion and to how it might resonate with the ancient reader. In the second part of this volume each of the three studies draws something from the Iliad, and each one achieves something slightly different by doing so. Gregory Sterling’s thesis of apologetic historiography is built upon the need for an alien social group living amidst potentially hostile superior powers to interpret itself favourably in the light of the dominant culture. This ideological dialogue, which manifests itself at the level of genre and lends itself to Àexible generic boundaries, relies not only upon mutualities in literary style and intertexts, but takes common tropes such as faith, courage, strength and citizenship. Every positive aspect of one culture can be framed narratively to impress itself upon another in intelligible terms, and this is what happens in Acts – the alien Jewish religion and the alien concept of a cruci¿ed Messiah is brought to the attention of a Greek readership through these positive cultural ideas, arguing that this unfamiliar religious sect leads its followers to the best of the known virtues, and has a God more powerful than any other. So Jewish/Greek dialogue is a major part of Acts, though not a singular purpose or even necessarily a conscious choice on the part of the author.64 When it comes to the more internal Christian/Jewish dialogue, a 64. I do not wish to enter into discussion on the extent and type of Jewish dialogue with other cultures in this period. For a solid discussion of these issues see Tessa Rajak, The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome: Studies in Cultural and 1

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different relationship emerges. Acts still wants to appear favourably to a Jewish audience, as is clear from its sustained argument that Jesus is prophesised in the Old Testament. But Acts differs from the ideology of contemporary Jewish literature in several important aspects. Military ideology, for example, is central to much Jewish literature of the period, but entirely absent from the Christian ideology of Acts. Wider ideological agreement on the theme of righteous and unrighteous death demonstrates the ideological consensus that God will punish the unrighteous and save the obedient. In Acts, Judas, Ananias, Sapphira, and Herod all meet an ignominious end; in 2 Maccabees there is Andronicus, Jason, Callisthenes ‘and some others’, Antiochus, Menelaus and Nicanor. Particularly analogous are the deaths of Herod and Antiochus, who both have to suffer at the hands of worms, and do so because of their ungodly arrogance. In this the two works are very closely related. Yet where much Jewish literature of the period (Esther, Judith, Maccabees) speaks of an ultimate victory in which God allows the Jews to take vengeance on their enemies, Acts clearly avoids any sense of a military solution, or even military courage, as playing a positive role. When it comes to the ideological zone of martyrdom, there are also similarities.65 The piety of Eleazar’s speech is every bit the match of Stephen’s: ‘For even if for the present I should avoid the punishment of men, yet whether I live or die I shall not escape the hands of the Almighty’ (2 Macc. 6.26). But there are key differences. Eleazar makes his stand against the Gentiles, and he makes it for the Torah and Temple. Stephen is presumably a Diasporic Jew, and, in a sense, from ‘among the Gentiles’. He makes his stand against Jews persecuting him in a manner that places them in the role of wicked oppressors. Stephen is accused of being an enemy of both Torah and Temple – but Acts takes some pains to express that Stephen has committed no offence against either: ÊÍżÁĕžÊÚŠ̼ ÌġŠ¸ġÅ Á¸Ė ÌÇİË ÈɼʹÍÌñÉÇÍË Á¸Ė ÌÇİË ºÉ¸Äĸ̼ėË Á¸Ė ëÈÀÊÌÚÅÌ¼Ë ÊÍÅûÉȸʸŠ¸ĤÌġÅ Á¸Ė ôº¸ºÇÅ ¼ĊË Ìġ ÊÍÅñ»ÉÀÇÅ, 13 ìÊ̾ÊÚŠ̼ ÄÚÉÌÍÉ¸Ë Ð¼Í»¼ėË ÂñºÇÅ̸˷ ĝ ÓÅ¿ÉÑÈÇË ÇīÌÇË ÇĤ ȸį¼Ì¸À Â¸ÂľÅ ģûĸ̸ Á¸ÌÛ ÌÇı ÌĠÈÇÍ ÌÇı ÖºĕÇÍ [ÌÇįÌÇÍ] Á¸Ė ÌÇı ÅĠÄÇÍ· 14 ÒÁ¾ÁĠ¸Ä¼Å ºÛÉ ¸ĤÌÇı ÂñºÇÅÌÇË ĞÌÀ `¾ÊÇıË ĝ ¸½ÑɸėÇË ÇīÌÇË Á¸Ì¸ÂįʼÀ ÌġÅ ÌĠÈÇÅ ÌÇıÌÇÅ Á¸Ė ÒÂÂÚƼÀ ÌÛ ì¿¾ Ø È¸Éñ»ÑÁ¼Å ÷ÄėÅ ÑŨÊýË. 15 Á¸Ė Ò̼ÅĕʸÅÌ¼Ë ¼ĊË ¸ĤÌġÅ ÈÚÅÌ¼Ë ÇĎ Á¸¿¼½ĠļÅÇÀ ëÅ ÌŊ ÊÍż»ÉĕĿ ¼č»ÇÅ Ìġ ÈÉĠÊÑÈÇÅ ¸ĤÌÇı ĸʼĖ ÈÉĠÊÑÈÇÅ ÒººñÂÇÍ. (Acts 6.12-15)

Social Interaction (Boston: Brill Academic, 2002), or Judith Lieu, The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire (New York: Routledge, 1992). 65. See for example, Rajak, Jewish Dialogue, pp.96–133. 1

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In fact, Stephen is able to say to the Jews: Á¾ÉÇÌÉÚϾÂÇÀ Á¸Ė ÒȼÉĕÌľÌÇÀ Á¸É»ĕ¸ÀË Á¸Ė ÌÇėË ĴÊĕÅ, ĨļėË Ò¼Ė ÌŊ ÈżįĸÌÀ ÌŊ ÖºĕĿ ÒÅÌÀÈĕÈ̼̼, ĸË ÇĎ È¸ÌñÉ¼Ë ĨÄľÅ Á¸Ė ĨļėË. 52 ÌĕŸ ÌľÅ ÈÉÇÎ¾ÌľÅ ÇĤÁ ë»ĕÑƸŠÇĎ È¸ÌñÉ¼Ë ĨÄľÅ; Á¸Ė ÒÈñÁ̼ÀŸŠÌÇİË ÈÉÇÁ¸Ì¸ºº¼ĕ¸ÅÌ¸Ë È¼ÉĖ ÌýË ë¼įʼÑË ÌÇı »ÀÁ¸ĕÇÍ Çī ÅıÅ ĨļėË ÈÉÇ»Ġ̸À Á¸Ė ÎÇżėË ëºñżʿ¼, 53 ÇďÌÀÅ¼Ë ëÂÚ¹¼Ì¼ ÌġÅ ÅĠÄÇÅ ¼ĊË »À¸Ì¸ºÛË ÒººñÂÑÅ, Á¸Ė ÇĤÁ ëÎÍÂÚƸ̼. (Acts 7.51-53)

The two martyrs, then, have a great deal in common; this ultimate sacri¿ce is a powerful weapon, and Luke paints a character that is brave, noble and unafraid of death, much as Eleazar is described. But Stephen’s piety turns Eleazar’s principles back upon the Jewish people – piety is not reserved for the Jews against the Gentiles, and obedience to Moses is not restricted to keeping the traditions, but involves listening to his words and acting upon them. The Jewish milieu had by this time already borrowed greatly from the Greek, making it impossible to know exactly who Luke was imitating or subverting, and, of course, pagan martyrdom also carried a cultural freight; Luke cannot help but engage with one when he engages with the other.66 V. Conclusion: Genre and Narrative Coherence The perception of genre espoused in this chapter is one that eschews ¿xed boundaries. Even those genres that have become automatised, such as the great epics, are absorbed in some form by new genres wanting to ironise them, borrow their cultural prestige or simply adopt their wellknown structural principles in order to provide a contextual frame for the reader. Literary artistry creates a prerogative of change because any work that is imitated too often becomes formulaic and loses its ef¿cacy. Likewise, changing social circumstances, including the introduction of the literary forms of alien cultures, create new social and literary conditions that naturally bring about changes in literary style. Genre is a system of classi¿cation that has always been socially charged and hierarchical, but authors have not been as mindful in the creation of their works as the history of scholarship has supposed. Very few genres in the period of Acts’ composition were ¿xed enough to be identi¿ed by taxonomy alone.

66. For some examples of Pagan martyrdom see Herbert Musurillo, The Acts of the Pagan Martyrs: Acta Alexandrinorum (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000).

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Every work of literature steps into an ongoing conversation with its social and literary environment, and in that setting makes itself heard – its communication can only be properly understood as a response anticipating a response. Literature, particularly prose narrative, is capable of artistically representing other genres and voices and communicating its message by refraction against them, which means that their presence in a text is not necessarily signi¿cant in terms of classi¿cation. Heliodorus makes considerable use of the Epic style in his opening lines, Achilles Tatius draws upon Socratic dialogue, Josephus upon Greek ideas of philosophy. Acts sits well in this dialectical context: a narrative on the cusp of two cultures, one dominant, one uncomfortable in its subjugation. Acts makes particular use of the Septuagint, the Jewish novella, the Bios, the Epic, and even the Greco-Roman Novel, while engaging in a dialogue with Hellenistic historiography, particularly the sort written by outsiders to describe their own culture in Hellenistic terms. More speci¿cally still, Acts is in dialogue with the early Christian movement, defending Luke’s view of that movement from within an ideological framework shared or at least understood by most Hellenised people: the combination of common texts and common culture allowed Luke to direct his audience as to how to read his narrative. The most important principle established through this methodological study is that anything resembling a binary classi¿cation of Acts’ genre is likely to be unhelpful in interpreting the text, because any presupposition that rules out the use of a given genre as a possible clue to the interpretation of the text simply reduces the number of intertextual frames we apply to the text. This does not mean that some genres are not more signi¿cant than others, or that the ancients could not have placed Acts into some speci¿c category. It merely means that in our attempt to reconstruct the target audience’s likely reading of Acts, the net must be cast as broadly as possible. Attempting to narrow the range of texts used to interpret Acts by ¿rst identifying its genre is a methodological error that minimises potentially important textual elements. The most obvious application of these ¿ndings is an ecumenical approach to the text which makes use of any genre that suggests itself, either through similarity or difference. An eye for the signposts that point to other texts or genres must be developed in reference to Luke’s literary and cultural world. These signposts were known to the target audience of Acts through their presence in countless other narratives available in that period, and reconstructing them two thousand years later means 1

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developing a deep familiarity with as many texts as possible that were likely to have been important in Luke’s literary background and semiotic space. In the next chapter we begin to look at narrative con¿guration – the search for these signs. This is approached through what is perhaps the biggest problem in the quest for the genre of Acts – the question as to whether Acts should be grouped among histories or ¿ctions. This should put some meat on the bones of the method while also overcoming some anticipated reservations about an approach to genre that is nonclassi¿catory.

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Chapter 4

HISTORY AND FICTION

I. Introduction In the investigation so far it has been evident that the question of history and historicity is an important underlying issue in the study of Acts’ genre. In this chapter I hope to move past that issue by demonstrating that the model of genre developed in the previous chapter allows ¿ctional and historical traits to exist in tension while allowing truth-claims to stand. Working from known intertexts and an assumption of some shared cultural knowledge, this chapter argues that readers of Acts were given suf¿cient signposts to understand these claims and integrate them into the interpretative process. One might think that classifying a narrative as either ¿ctional or historical is a simple matter, with Acts somehow constituting a dif¿cult exception, but this is not the case. Texts that play with the boundaries between history and ¿ction are commonplace, from histories that imaginatively recreate events, to historical novels such as War and Peace, to stories with pseudo-historical claims like The Turn of the Screw, or even Callirhoe. Roland Boer, in a brilliant deconstruction of Martin Noth’s Deuteronomistic History, shows that by Noth’s own, seminal analysis, there is very little to separate sections of the Hebrew Bible from the historical novel.1 The stories of Joseph, Saul, David, Absalom, Ruth, Esther, Job and Jonah are all good examples, while Abraham, Noah, the tower of Babel and many other stories have touches of the mythical. To illustrate the dif¿culty, one might take Homer, Herodotus, Apollonius of Tyana, War and Peace and Sharpe’s RiÀes. All of these texts have externally referential elements of different strengths and natures – that is to say, all refer to an historical reality outside of the text, – yet only one of them is usually classi¿ed as a history. The Stories 1. Roland Boer, Novel Histories: The Fiction of Biblical Criticism (Playing the Texts 2; Shef¿eld: Shef¿eld Academic, 1997), pp.21–46, especially pp.38–40.

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of Apollonius of Tyre, according to Ewen Bowie, resists classi¿cation in several different ways as part of its rhetorical strategy.2 Herodotus, always classed as a history, but often considered less historical than Thucydides, presents a different challenge to the notion that external reference value equates to the historiographical mode. Interestingly, despite much criticism of the historicity of his accounts, nobody is suggesting that Herodotus is ¿ctional; rather, they suggest it is bad history,3 and as Meir Sternberg has observed, ‘bad historiography does not yet make ¿ction’.4 Both of Homer’s works have external referents, and can in some sense be called historical, or even history in the generic sense, and yet are certainly not in anything like the same mould as Thucydides, Polybius or Appion. The remaining two refer to two different types of referents – Sharpe is a ¿ctional character placed in an historical context, while Napoleon is an historical person in an historical context, but ¿ctionalised. As a simple exercise, these books could be handed to any modern person, and upon request they will be divided into two piles – four ¿ctions and one history. Ancient readers would no doubt have seen it differently, but that does not mean that the ancient person was somehow de¿cient in his skills of generic delineation. Rather, it means that their own literary instincts were developed to read their own literature. a. An Overview of the Theoretical Problem Part of the problem in discerning between ¿ction and history is that ¿ctionality itself has held an anomalous status in communication theory. For a long time a dissonance existed between a theoretical model that posited truth as an integral element of communication, and the importance that readers give to ¿ction, which is by de¿nition not true. H. P. Grice’s maxims of communication, perhaps the most widely accepted model of the last century, include ‘be relevant’ and ‘do not say what you

2. Ewen Bowie, ‘Philostratus: Writer of Fiction’, in Morgan and Stoneman, eds., Greek Fiction, p.187. 3. See especially O. Kimball Armayor, Herodotus’ Autopsy of the Fayoum: Lake Moeris and the Labyrinth of Egypt (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1985); Detlev Fehling, Die Quellenangaben bei Herodot: Studien zur Erzählkunst Herodots (Untersuchungen zur antiken Literatur und Geschichte 9; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971). A more impartial discussion can be found in Kenneth H. Waters, Herodotos, the Historian: His Problems, Methods, and Originality (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), pp.152–66. For a refutation of arguments against Herodotus, see W. Kendrick Pritchett, The Liar School of Herodotos (Amsterdam: Gieben, 1993). 4. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, p.25.

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believe to be false’.5 But these two maxims exist in paradox within ¿ction, which obviously manages to be relevant (that is, many people bother to read it) while being able to be absolutely false. Several attempts have been made to account for ¿ctionality within this framework. One such attempt sees ¿ctionality as an imitation display text. First expounded by Richard Ohmann, and developed by John Searle,6 this model sees ¿ctionality as suspending the appropriate conditions for communication. Fictional texts then meet the criterion of truth by imitating it. This mimesis model, however, falls short of an effective solution. Such an account of the value of ¿ction sees it as a pretended discourse. In this model [a] novel is the equipment for the reader’s game of make-believe, but if involvement in ¿ction is an act of make-believe, then either the emotions aroused are also make-believe, framed and quali¿ed as part of the game, or they remain irreducibly paradoxical.7

When a text moves a reader on a genuine emotional level, the idea of make-believe is inadequate, and the reality that known ¿ctional discourse creates real emotional effects jars with the theoretical tenet that for communication to be effective it must be true. Another concept in literary theory that attempts to explicate ¿ctional discourse in line with speech-act theory is that of ‘¿ctional worlds’, articulated by Nelson Goodman, Marie-Laure Ryan and Thomas Pavel.8 In this model the reader creates a ¿ctional world based on a principal of minimal departure from reality: the reader assumes the norms of his own physical and social world, and differentiates the textual world from it according to textual cues. This theory is essentially a development of mimesis theory and suffers from the same faults; as such it does not make any signi¿cant advance on the ‘make-believe’ problem, which is 5. H. P. Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p.27. 6. Richard Ohmann, ‘Speech Acts and the De¿nition of Literature’, P & R 4, no. 1 (1971), pp.1–19; John R. Searle, ‘Indirect Speech Acts’, in Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 3, Speech Acts (ed. Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan; Gen. ed. John P. Kimball; New York: Academic, 1975), pp.59–82. 7. Walsh, Rhetoric of Fictionality, p.156. 8. Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986); Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Harvester Studies in Philosophy 5; Hassocks: Harvester, 1978); Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (Parallax: Re-visions of Culture and Society; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 1

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ultimately one of relevance. No matter how a ¿ctional world is constructed or enjoyed, it remains ¿ctional; any communication model that places truth at its centre fails to account for its relevance. In short, both the imitation speech-act and the ¿ctional world’s models assume relevance and work to close the theoretical distance between ¿ction and the truth maxim. II. Fiction and Cognition If explicitly untrue statements do not meet the basic requirements for redeeming the communicative principle of truth, Grice’s communication model cannot account for ¿ction without relegating it to the function of ‘pretended speech-act’. Sperber and Wilson’s development of this theory is to deprioritise the truth maxim and replace it with a highly prioritised relevance maxim. Optimal relevance in this model is supplied primarily by context, as was seen above.9 What this increased dependence on context means for the truth criterion is complex, but a look at this example will show that it cannot be said to simply apply to the majority of speech acts. Even if it is accepted that Lisa’s statement above (I’ve eaten) is in all important senses true, there are plenty of exceptions: A: B:

Do you fancy going out? It’s raining.

Context assures that B is assumed to imply that she does not want to go out in the rain. A assumes that what B says is relevant, and therefore seeks an appropriate interpretative context, which in this case means taking ‘it’s raining’ as a direct response to his question – rain is unpleasant, and it is better to go out when it is dry. But what if it is not raining? The conversation might then continue: A: B:

No it’s not. (Tersely) well it might.

B is now making it clear that she does not want to go out, and a relevance is achieved that depends on B having made an untrue statement: if it were actually raining, A would have no cause to feel rejected, but since it is not, he knows that B does not want to go out with him. So in this example, the success of the communication relies upon untruth for its relevance. Other examples might include exaggeration: ‘I’d kill for a cup of tea’, sarcasm: ’cos we all know how brilliant you are at Chess’ and rebuttal: ‘What’s wrong dear?’ ‘Nothing!’ Of course, all of these answers 1

9. See above, pp.81–3.

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have strong contextual elements that dictate their meaning far more than their explicit content, which in all of these cases is literally untrue. Literal statements can therefore no longer be de¿ned as statements that do not require inference,10 since inference is ever-present. The bene¿t of this in dealing with the question of ¿ctionality is that it allows the communication of ¿ction to be relevant without ¿nding some unintuitive relationship to truth. Instead, the reader of a ¿ctional text would unconsciously seek the appropriate framework in which to decode the narrative– in this case the various conventions of ¿ction inform her that literal truth is not part of the required context. Sidestepping the entire problem of true/false, she is then able to con¿gure the text according to a referentially deprioritised narrative modality that suspends the restrictions associated with the historical mode, but does not suspend external referentiality itself – the deprioritisation of literal truth merely means that such references are subordinated to ¿t within a ¿ctional framework. Relevance, freed from the truth criterion, can be as simple as ‘enjoyment’.11 In a cognitive environment that deprioritises external reference, the internally referential is prioritised in an inverse ratio because it is necessary to apply an interpretative framework that makes the text relevant. Where one system of con¿guring the text fails, another must be applied. Authors take advantage of this unconscious rule when alternating between ¿ction and history to allow readers to work out for themselves which referential system they are meant to be operating in at a given moment. To take an example of this from the ancient world, one might look at Xenophon. When he composed the Cyropaedia, he presumably expected his reader to suspend questions of sources and the like while acknowledging the historical basis of Cyrus’ life story. He goes about this in a number of ways, applying conventions with a rich history in his literary milieu, such as the opening ‘utopian state’ theme with which he describes Persia at the time Cyrus was born, and the ‘excellent youth’ theme that the ancient reader must have used to con¿gure the detailed and completely unsourced dinner scene with his grandfather.12 The series of 10. Sperber and Wilson, ‘Truthfulness and Relevance’, p.587, date this tendency back to classical rhetoric, but as an example use the discussion in David K. Lewis, ‘Languages and Language’, in Philosophical Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p.167. 11. I do not wish to explore the theory behind why literature might be enjoyable, and in any case there are, to my mind, no satisfactory answers in scholarship. 12. The excellent youth theme can be found in Plutarch’s Lives. See 1.6.2 for Theseus, 2.6.2 for Romulus. Diogenes Laertius suggests that stories about the early excellence of Plato (3.4-5) and Pythagoras (8.2-3) were also extant. 1

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romanticised places and events depicted without critical distance forces the audience to suspend disbelief and simply enjoy the narrative, while the real existence of the various characters simultaneously prevents the reader from dismissing the entire story as ¿ction. External reference is present but deprioritised and the reader is led to expect narrative rather than real-world logic to apply, which in turn suggests what narrative cues she should be looking for and allows her to begin the con¿gurative process. So, for example, the ‘utopian state’ of the Persians means they will be an honourable people, while the ‘excellent youth’ theme that describes Cyrus’ childhood means he will go on to great things. These are elements of narrative, not real-world logic, though of course they have an ideological basis that touches upon the world outside the text and is an integral part of the communication. a. History as Constrained Narrative This understanding of the reading process incorporates and allows for every stage of the ¿ctional/historical spectrum by acknowledging the mind’s ability to navigate complex literary terrain, while removing the primacy of truth as key to effective communication. Freed from the problem of truth, ¿ction becomes a narrative form under minimal constraint, while history becomes the mode in which truth-claims restrict the poetic licence – an agreement between author and reader that the events narrated will have some basis in truth: Fiction is no longer seen as narrative with certain rules (of reference) in abeyance. Rather, non-¿ctional narrative is seen as narrative under certain supplementary constraints (connoting historicity, objectivity, etc.) that serve to establish a rhetoric of veracity.13

This ‘rhetoric of veracity’ naturally varies from literary epoch to literary epoch, but history as a narrative mode must always exist in dialectical tension with ¿ction: if the rhetoric of either mode is to be successful it must account for the other and distinguish itself accordingly. This is axiomatic whenever ¿ctional and non-¿ctional narratives exist side by side, or to be more precise, since narratives that do not make truth-claims have co-existed with narratives that do. History as a narrative mode must distinguish itself from ¿ction by some technique or other, while ¿ction plays at being history by parodying or alluding to historical conventions, while never needing to subject itself properly to these constraints.

1

13. Walsh, Rhetoric of Fictionality, p.39.

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Palmer-Bonz argues in The Past as Legacy that histories are less coherent than the epic, containing less compositional unity.14 Such an argument would not stand up to scrutiny for all the reasons of generic hybridity that have been discussed already. Nonetheless, there is some merit to the idea. Kalle Pihlainen suggests that while the restrictions placed on history do not always manifest themselves on the micro-level, on the macro-level they serve to distinguish the modal difference: Although the process of narrative construction is quite similar in both literary and historical narratives, the difference that referentiality brings is reÀected in the narrative form, or rather, in the system of signi¿cation that the narration employs. Although we cannot see any textual difference between historical narratives and ¿ctional ones when examining them on the level of the individual statement or on the level of conjunctions of these statements, there is a distinct difference to be perceived in the coherency of the systems of signi¿cation that are created by these respective types of narrative.15

Pihlainen admits that this is a ‘general rule’,16 which cannot be easily relied upon. Complexity is ‘not a necessary outcome of ¿ctionalization’.17 But he is right to claim that the contemporary reader’s instinctive ability to assess narrative truth-claims is not attributable to any single textual element: such decisions are made over larger units. The decoding of the text is a process that occurs over the whole narrative, with each individual element adding something to the whole. In the historical mode these elements can sometimes be valuable for reasons of purely external reference – such and such a nation was utterly repugnant because it did this and that, with social and cultural relevance but no intrinsic narrative value – that is, the data leave no thread to be picked up later in the text. When external reference is entirely deprioritised, narrative logic suggests to the reader that there is a thread, that all information will play a role in the story at some point – one classic example of which is the fairy-tale trope in which the protagonist performs seemingly insigni¿cant acts of kindness in the early part of the text and is rewarded by those he has helped later in the story.18 A deprioritised external referentiality means that the reader decodes the narrative on the assumption that all data is relevant to the story itself, even if the sole reason for its relevance is to play upon the constructive principle of an historical genre. 14. Palmer-Bonz, The Past as Legacy, p.22. 15. Kalle Pihlainen, ‘The Moral of the Historical Story: Textual Differences in Fact and Fiction’, NLH 33, no. 1 (2002), p.43. 16. Pihlainen, ‘The Moral of the Historical Story’, p.43. 17. Pihlainen, ‘The Moral of the Historical Story’, p.43. 18. A trope used to great effect recently in the novel Q&A by Vikas Swarup.

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III. The Conventions of Reading Relevance theory relies upon a mutual cognitive environment between author and audience. The author predicts or assumes his audience’s access to aspects of this environment and signposts it through title, preface, allusion, reference or citation – by whatever will serve the necessary purpose: Successful communication hinges on the potential context that is mutually shared by the reader and the communicator. That is, only when the communicator’s intention and the receptor’s expectation meet, can communication be a success.19

These indicators are naturally synchronic, reliant as they are upon social and literary norms that are always changing. Consequently, the reading of an ancient text is problematised by inadequate access to the total context, making the primary job of the biblical critic one of reconstructing an appropriate cognitive environment within which to decode the message. This can only be done via the contemporary and antecedental textual framework – a semi-taxonomic enterprise which even it were made possible by having all the texts extant and prioritised, in the absence of secondary data from the social sphere itself would be extremely liable to misinterpretation. Nonetheless, mechanisms that narrowed the range of potential contexts must have existed because communication requires it; in literature such context is provided largely by reference to the conventions of prior narratives. Peter Rabinowitz has formulated a system for looking at the conventions of narrative as an aid to interpretation.20 His classi¿cation divides the process of reading into four conventions: Notice, Signi¿cation, Con¿guration and Coherence.21 Notice is the way the text highlights important elements for the reader’s attention. In modern ¿ction this includes apparently incongruous elements of the text that evade immediate coherence within the narrative. Such elements suggest their importance because of the very fact that they Àaunt the law of relevance: the rule that everything in the narrative should have a purpose. Other loci of strong conventionality include the beginning of the narrative and the beginning and end of each section, all 19. Sang Zhonggang, ‘A Relevance Theory Perspective on Translating the Implicit Information in Literary Texts’, JT 2, no. 2 (2006), p.44. 20. Peter J. Rabinowitz, Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998). 21. For the sake of clarity I will continue to capitalise these terms when I use them in this sense proposed by Rabinowitz. 1

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of which can exploit their position to Notice an aspect. In reality Notice conventions are densely distributed throughout any narrative. Following the conventions of Notice are those of Signi¿cation, which is the type of importance given to the Noticed element. Rabinowitz observes the use of names, such as Lev, from ‘lion’, and Nicolaevich Myshkin, from ‘mouse’ (in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot). Palmer-Bonz argues similarly for Lydia in Acts: As the Spirit directs the Pauline mission toward Rome, the center of world power, its converts begin to include a number of gentiles with a degree of wealth or social position. One early example of this phenomenon is Lydia, the dealer in purple cloth from Thyatira (Acts 16.14) whose felicitous combination of name, occupation, and place of origin suggests that Luke is presenting the reader with a symbolic character. Rather than representing a historical person, therefore, Lydia is almost certainly a Lukan literary creation; she epitomizes a type of convert that Luke wishes to introduce at this point in his portrayal of the historical development of the mission, a convert who, although relatively low in social status, is somewhat well-to-do nonetheless.22

If Palmer-Bonz is correct (and I do not wish to argue her point here), the name has Notice value because of Lydia’s historical association with riches. The natural Signi¿cation of this particular name is to attribute to Paul’s converts in general the sort of status that Lydia represents through her name and profession. She is essentially a metonym for the wealthy and socially respectable converts that Luke wishes to attribute to the Pauline mission whose name carries matching consequences – this is narrative rather than real-world logic. Such an interpretation clearly has implications for the historicity of Acts, but also makes an ideological claim about the ideal convert to early Christianity, and potentially clari¿es an element of Lukan intentionality that might otherwise go unobserved.23 Signi¿cation is the cognitive consequence of a Notice convention, because the search for relevance ensures that the meaning of the Noticed element will be sought. Individually, Signi¿ed aspects are often ambiguous or barely memorable at all: it is the accumulation of Noticed elements within a particular range or theme that create a framework of Signi¿cations – this is Con¿guration. It is impossible for an author to have absolute control of the con¿gurative process, because every reader has a unique range of cognitive resources. While the ability of author and 22. Palmer-Bonz, The Past as Legacy, p.167. 23. Pervo, Dating Acts, p.31, makes a similar point in a less direct way about Eutychus, whose name means ‘lucky’. 1

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reader varies enormously, authors must assume that readers will decode the message, while readers must assume that the message makes sense. The message’s success depends on the presupposition of its own optimal relevance. Signi¿cation is the name Rabinowitz uses to describe each step in the con¿gurative process. Rabinowitz’ ¿nal convention is Coherence. In Rabinowitz’ terminology, Coherence is not just the end product of Con¿guration (though in practice this is often the case, for example in the resolution of the plot), but also the result of reÀection on the entirety of the narrative. For Rabinowitz, genre is an important part of coherence, and in this respect it can be understood as playing a lead role in the formation of an interpretative framework for the text – a frame then becomes a resource for decoding the next narrative. At this point genre becomes intertextual, acting as a means of narrowing the possible interpretative strategies and directing the reader along the interpretative paths intended by the author. While individual Notices and their concomitant Signi¿cations control each element of the text’s interpretation, Genre allows the reader to make broad assumptions about the ultimate shape of the text, giving valuable direction from the outset. Clearly, different conventions apply to ¿ction than to history, but at the individual level such differences are slight and dif¿cult to quantify. Only at the level of Con¿guration and Coherence is it possible to see distinctions large enough to help differentiate between the two modes. Kalle Pihlainen’s systems of signi¿cation are seen here as the need to apply different interpretative frameworks in order to con¿gure the narrative into a coherent whole.24 In an historical text, frequent and prioritised external referents for many Noticed elements may result in non-achievement of this tight internal coherence – but since the relevance lies in real-world relations, the reader does not expect this anyway and so is not disappointed; all that is required is suf¿cient coding to inform the reader of this modality in the ¿rst place (usually by initial genre-indicators). The reader is primed for history to impinge upon his narrative world, and expects external referentiality partially to usurp internal coherence. If the initial conventions/ genre-indicators suggest we are in the ¿ctional mode, the reader begins selecting elements for a different cognitive environment, and begins to believe that Notice leads to Signi¿cation to Con¿guration to Coherence. This is not a simple rule, as anyone who has encountered the long digressions in Leucippe and Clitipho or the allusions to classical tragedy

1

24. See above, p.101.

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in Thucydides will testify: but it is fair to say that clear and repeated external referentiality that does not contribute to the internal coherence of the narrative is a convention of the historiographical rather than the ¿ctional mode. Truth-claims, perhaps surprisingly, can be con¿gured within either mode, and great authors from Dickens to Chariton make use of them without prioritising external referentiality. a. Propositional versus Poetic Implicatures If messages must be contextualised in order to be processed, and if the historical mode tends toward a prioritised external referentiality, it follows that the Signi¿cation system used to process historiographical works tends to rely heavily on the real world as the chief source of relevance, even if that real-world information is often sourced from other texts. External reference tends to be direct in nature, making the Signi¿cations more propositional than poetic. One might take almost any example from among the highly rated historians: The ¿rst death under the new emperor, that of Junius Silanus, proconsul of Asia, was, without Nero’s knowledge, planned by the treachery of Agrippina. Not that Silanus had provoked destruction by any violence of temper, apathetic as he was, and so utterly despised under former despotisms, that Caius Caesar used to call him the golden sheep. The truth was that Agrippina, having contrived the murder of his brother Lucius Silanus, dreaded his vengeance; for it was the incessant popular talk that preference ought to be given over Nero, who was scarcely out of his boyhood and had gained the empire by crime, to a man of mature age, of blameless life, of noble birth, and, as a point then much regarded, of the line of the Caesars. (Tacitus, Annals 13.1)25

Tacitus conveys information whose primary value is in its external reference. Very little of it con¿gures meaningfully or artfully into a narrative whole, but instead it relays data (much of which has high narrative potential) in a simple, propositional way, with minimal allusion. The death of Silanus is related and explained without any expectation that it will be developed later in the narrative. Literary works on the other hand, can be described as …characterized by ‘careful use of language, being written in a literary genre (poetry, prose ¿ction, or drama), being read aesthetically, and containing many weak implicatures’ (Meyer 1997: 24). The weak implicatures are the implicit information in the literary texts… Owing to the

25. Online: http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/annals.9.xiii.html (accessed 12 December 2011). 1

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Genre and Narrative Coherence in the Acts of the Apostles implicit information in the literary texts, the author of the source text often becomes more capable of communicating a richness of ideas, feelings and impressions that are not necessarily expressed in words.26

Weak implicatures are, unfortunately, not the easiest things to de¿ne. Sperber and Wilson’s account describes these weak implicatures as ‘poetic effects’, which create a change in the cognitive environment ‘resulting from relatively small alterations in the manifestness of many assumptions, rather than from the fact that a single assumption or a few new assumptions have all of a sudden become very manifest’.27 Such implicatures have an irreducibly imaginative nature. Take, for example, the pathetic fallacy used to open Robert Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover. The rain came early in tonight, The sullen wind was soon awake, It tore the elm-tops down for spite, And did its worst to vex the lake: I listened with heart ¿t to break.28

Propositionally, these lines have no information relevant to the story whatsoever. The weather is irrelevant to the following events, which occur indoors, and neither the lake, nor the damage to the trees, ¿gure in it anyway. Yet it might be argued that without these lines, Browning’s poem would be much the worse – the implications for the bleakness of the protagonist’s mood, the destruction that reverberates through the opening impressions, all sit in counterpoint to Porphyria’s metonymic and symbolic light, tending the ¿re and freeing her long blonde hair. At the same time, the madness of the unnamed man, who goes on to strangle her with her hair so as to preserve her at the moment he realises she loves him, is pre¿gured in these lines. Thus, in this highly poetic form con¿gurative value exists in cognitive effects that entirely lack propositional value – the complete opposite to Tacitus, above; and as Kalle Pihlainen has noted (above), this distinction can be generally applied to history and ¿ction.29 26. Zhonggang, ‘Translating Literary Texts’, p.43. Cf. Jim Meyer, ‘What Is Literature? A De¿nition Based on Prototypes’, Work Papers of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, University of North Dakota Session 41 (ed. Stephen A. Marlett, 1997), p.24. Online: http://www.und.nodak.edu/dept/linguistics/wp/1997Meyer. PDF (accessed 25 September 2011). 27. Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, p.222. 28. Robert Browning, Porphyria’s Lover, in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (ed. M. H. Abrams; 2 vols.; London: Norton, 7th edn, 2000), vol. 2, p.1349. 29. See above, p.101. 1

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Sperber and Wilson do not tackle the problem of ¿ction at any particular length or with any rigour, but they do talk at some length about what they call ‘poetic effects’, which create a change in the cognitive environment ‘resulting from relatively small alterations in the manifestness of many assumptions, rather than from the fact that a single assumption or a few new assumptions have all of a sudden become very manifest’.30 These poetic effects obviously incorporate literary allusion and the various intertextual, non-propositional effects of literature: They marginally increase the manifestness of a great many manifest assumptions. In other words, poetic effects create common impressions rather than common knowledge. Utterances with poetic effects can be used precisely to create this sense of apparently affective rather than cognitive mutuality. What we are suggesting is that, if you look at these affective effects through the microscope of relevance theory, you see a wider array of minute cognitive effects.31

Such small implicatures so widely dispersed are too small for conscious notice, meaning that they affect the unconscious and manifest themselves emotively. They provide a poetic context that alerts the competent reader to deprioritised external referentiality. These tiny cognitive effects create the distinctive enjoyment of literature, a style that history can and does make use of, but which is often relegated in that mode to a secondary role. It is important to note, however, that large, propositional utterances are far easier to see than the ‘marginal increase’ in the ‘manifestness of a great many assumptions’ created by these minute implicatures. The modern reader might not recognise the value of the former, but he will always see them; the latter become more dif¿cult to see as cultural and literary distance increases. Certain conventions de¿nitely Notice the presence of certain intertexts and their typical range of implicatures. ‘Once upon a time…’ suggests a certain contextual frame, ‘The world of the Lord came to…’ suggests another – and both of these imply different types of con¿guration, alerting the reader to notice particular elements and put them together in particular ways. Once they are introduced, the appropriate intertexts enter the cognitive framework of the reader, but this does not mean that there is an assumption of genre. If someone began a novel (and I am sure someone has) with ‘Once upon a time I met a girl. Then I murdered her.’ it would not mean that the murder should be read as a fairytale. Rather, the fairytale genre adds something surreal to the idea of murder, and

1

30. Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, p.59. 31. Sperber and Wilson, Relevance, p.224.

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creates a discom¿tingly unreal view of a brutal crime. But even ‘I met a girl’ is highly conventional: placed at the beginning of the narrative, the accumulation of conventions present in this single sentence suggests an interpretative framework for the entire story. Genres and their intertextual af¿liations suggest conventional frameworks that the reader might use to decode the narrative, but these can be played against each other and Àouted in complex ways: such dif¿culties should inspire caution rather than classi¿cation when the very Greek and historiographicalsounding prefaces to Luke and Acts are followed by heavily Semitic and Septuagintal style full of prophecy and the supernatural. There is no doubt that a large number of ¿ctions, particularly in the ancient world, employ a range of ‘historical’ techniques, and that histories employed many ‘¿ctional’ techniques. The point, however, is not that one genre employs one technique and one the other, but that, barring a signi¿cant error, a contemporary reader with a reasonable competence is always capable of constructing an intricate and nuanced cognitive environment which ¿nds the approximate intention of the author. Acts contains elements of both ¿ctional and historical modes, and to make a classi¿cation that excludes or minimises one type of effect reduces interpretative resources dramatically. Instead, it is important to explore the type of cognitive environment an ancient reader would have used to decode this text. b. The Hebrew Bible and the Rhetoric of Historicity The preference of Acts scholars for minimising the poetic in favour of the propositional also ¿nds justi¿cation in the truth-claims that Acts de¿nitely does make, both explicitly in the preface and implicitly throughout the text, by telling the (partially) veri¿able story of historical characters, by adding small details such as the number of witnesses to an event, the number of converts, and by alluding strongly to Old Testament prophecy and its ful¿lment. This last in particular expresses a modal link between Acts and the Hebrew Bible, which, as was noted above, employs techniques that cannot be easily associated with historiography. Acknowledging the multiple narrative techniques utilised by it, prominent literary theorist and biblical scholar Meir Sternberg’s work goes against Robert Alter and others to argue that the Hebrew Bible is Historiography, despite the atypical historiographical conventions such as unsourced information, omniscient narration (such as inner-voice narration and divine-voice narration), strong ideological content, including the attribution of divine motives and such like, that appear to militate against this view. As John J. Collins has observed, such devices present a problem for any scholar attempting to assert biblical historicity: 1

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Any attempt to treat the OT narratives as reliable historical information is beset by the problem that there is a gulf between anything that can be established by critical historiography and the confession of divine activity that is central to the biblical texts.32

Sternberg attempts to reconcile the fact that the Bible makes serious truth-claims with this fundamental problem of undemonstrable and sometimes unknowable assertions. For Sternberg, this is a fact of biblical rhetoric, and the ‘category-mistake’ of attributing the status of ¿ction to the Bible is one that comes from misunderstanding the nature of the historiographical mode. In this, he echoes White and others, whose poststructuralist approach to historiography has been inÀuential in scholarship for some years. At times, Sternberg makes this quite explicit: For history-writing is not a record of fact – of what ‘really happened’ – but a discourse that claims to be a record of fact. Nor is ¿ction-writing a tissue of free inventions but a discourse that claims freedom of invention. The antithesis lies not in the presence or absence of truth value but in the commitment to truth value.33

‘Commitment to truth value’ is, I think, a phrase which reÀects Sternberg’s own views of the Bible, and should be considered carefully. Strictly speaking, commitment to truth-value, by Sternberg’s own de¿nition in this quotation, is irrelevant – what matters is the claim to truth value, and since any given history could be full of outright lies, commitment is not even subservient to claim, but a different matter altogether. Other than this, however, Sternberg’s point is absolutely correct: any text that genuinely claims to be history must in some sense be so, even if it is merely bad history. The conditions for a genuine claim of that nature will vary across literary epochs, but a conventional means of distinguishing between the two modes must always exist because readers need to draw a distinction between types of untruth – ¿ction or lies. Sternberg is wary of the attempt to ¿nd formal distinctions between history and ¿ction: There are simply no universals of historical vs. ¿ctive form. Nothing on the surface, that is, infallibly marks off the two genres. As modes of discourse, history and ¿ction make functional categories that may remain constant under the most assorted formal variations and are distinguishable only by their overall sense of purpose.34

32. John J. Collins, ‘The “Historical Character” of the Old Testament in Recent Biblical Theology’, CBQ 41 (1979), p.191. 33. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, p.25. 34. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, p.32. 1

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This rather unquanti¿able element, the ‘overall sense of purpose’, is commonsensical rather than rigorously scienti¿c, but ¿nds considerable agreement with Pihlainen’s view that the system of signi¿cations rather than any individual element is what allows a reader to distinguish between the two modes. Sternberg is effectively arguing that Hebrew narrative, while formally much like ¿ction, still has a claim to the genre of history on the grounds of this ‘commitment to truth value’. He does admit the apparent contradiction that, formally, such devices as omniscient narration that ‘reveals the hidden acts of God, the secret thoughts of all the participants’ as well as ‘the abundant dialogue scenes’35 could easily be mistaken for ¿ction, but it is also evident to him that the Bible claims not just the status of history but of the history – the one and only truth that, like God himself, brooks no rival… Suppose the Creation narrative elicited from the audience the challenge ‘But the Babylonians tell a different story!’ or the Exodus cycle met with the protest ‘But the Egyptians deny the whole thing!’ Would the biblical narrator just shrug his shoulders, as any self-respecting novelist would do? One inclined to answer in the af¿rmative would have to make ¿ctional sense of all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and I do not see how even a con¿rmed anachronist would go about it with any show of reason.36

So on the one hand, Sternberg recognises the apparently ¿ctional element in the composition of the Bible, while on the other hand, he correctly observes that the biblical narrator makes serious truth-claims; this is the contradiction that faces the Old Testament. Sternberg solves it with simplicity and literary insight: by recourse to the rhetoric of inspiration the biblical narrator is able to have it both ways. 1. Acts and Inspired History. A necessary requirement of Sternberg’s hypothesis is that the Hebrew Bible was an established or even dominant genre in ancient Israel. Assuming that this is the case, truth-claims are established by convention and can be accepted by the reader without dif¿culty. This is clearly not true for Acts, which is making essentially biblical truth-claims to an audience that might not even know the Hebrew Bible or Septuagint, but which certainly respects the very different and perhaps even opposing rhetoric of objectivity made prominent by Thucydides and others. The biblical context would be relevant to Diasporic Jews, but there is some question as to how it could be understood by the Greek Pagan reader. Commenting on this, Loveday Alexander argues:

1

35. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, p.32. 36. Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative, p.32.

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‘Ancient readers’ of course, are not a homogenous group: and readers who shared Josephus’ background knowledge of the Hebrew Scriptures would probably have no dif¿culty in recognizing Acts as a historical narrative in scriptural style. But for readers educated in the Greek classics, much of the narrative content of Acts would place it in the danger-area of ¿ction – though with a disturbing under-current which suggests that it might after all be fact. It deals with many of the topics which were pushed into the convenient no-go areas at the edges of the map of veri¿able ‘fact’ by Greek historians – distant places, non-Greek traditions, private beliefs, supernatural events.37

What Alexander alludes to here is that literary conventions for Greek readers would have dictated their con¿gurative practices for Acts. Luke’s response to the literary norms of a Greek audience necessarily meant negotiating multiple generic expectations in order to ensure the success of his communicative aims. Any mutual cognitive framework would have included Homer and Hesiod, Thucydides, Chariton and everything in between. Thucydides, as most agree, sets the standard for history writing, and it is a very different standard from Acts. In this environment any unsubstantiated truth-claims must have been potentially open to criticism, as is evident by the fact that Homer, the closest thing the Greeks had to a Bible, had long been criticised by Historians and had had its history corrected in commentaries and such like, becoming very much a disputed history of the origins of ancient Greece.38 On the other hand, the convention of appealing to the muse was one of the oldest and most venerable, known through Homer and Hesiod, and more recently emulated by Virgil. This poetic style of history had a momentum of its own, capable of upholding some sort of truth-claim: the existence of criticism of Homer’s truth-claims demonstrates that he was not automatically undermined by the historicity-criteria established by the great Greek historians. It is also worth remembering that the period of Acts’ composition was one in which the respected historian Plutarch could write of the infant Romulus being fed by a she-wolf and a woodpecker as ‘the story which has the widest credence and the greatest number of vouchers’,39 and discuss the existence of a minotaur without any sign of cynicism.40 The mythical past had some credibility to ancient Greeks. At the same time ‘pure’ ¿ction (de¿ned as narrative that completely deprioritises external reference) was a very young generic mode: 37. Alexander, Acts in its Ancient Literary Context, pp.161–2. 38. See for example, John Linton Myres, Homer and his critics (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958), p.20. 39. ‘Life of Romulus’, pp.3–4. 40. In the ‘Life of Theseus’.

1

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Chariton may only have been around a few decades, and there is nothing earlier that we know of (which only means that the genre was probably not pervasive), the vast majority of narratives before this time, whether tragedy, epic or mythology, were oriented around the mythical Greek past, and were of real importance to Greek identity.41 In some sense that a modern reader may not be able to fully comprehend, there was a mode of storytelling in ancient Greece that operated on a similar level to that of Hebrew historiography discussed by Sternberg – a style that straddled the boundaries of both history and ¿ction. That this more mythic truth-claim was still valid in the period of Acts is also evident in those historiographical genres in which an historical core was in dialogue with ¿ctional technique, such as The Alexander Romance, The Ninos Romance, the Cyropaedia and The Stories of Apollonius of Tyana. These texts combined an historical core with adventures and narrative patterns that a modern mind would call ¿ctional, and aimed to entertain and engage while giving some priority to external referentiality. Ewen Bowie argues that the strength of this historical element in Apollonius would form part of the reader’s understanding of the text: A feature which Apollonius shares with works on Pythagoras and on Jesus of Nazareth is that it concerns a ¿gure in whose historicity many readers believed. By the time Philostratus wrote many local traditions were already well established, associating Apollonius with miracles in mainland Greece, Ionia, Cilicia and Syria. That of Apollonius’ vision at Ephesus of Domitian’s simultaneous murder in Rome was famous enough to be written up by Cassius Dio. Some readers might know the previous literary works to which Philostratus refers and from which he must draw much: that on Apollonius’ youth by Maximus of Aegeae… All this establishes a presumption shared by writer and reader that there is a set of historical facts concerning Apollonius on which Philostratus may draw. He may select well or ill, he may elaborate without warrant, but he and his readers would agree that his story has a historical core. It differs in this from the novels.42

The Jewish novellas, it will be recalled, differ from the Greek novels in their stronger tendency towards historical verisimilitude,43 a generic convention that the author of Acts could not help but be aware of. The level of priority given to real-world logic and external referentiality was 41. See for example, James J. Clauss, The Best of the Argonauts: The Rede¿nition of the Epic Hero in Book 1 of Apollonius’s Argonautica (Hellenistic Culture and Society 10; Berkeley, CA; Oxford: University of California Press, 1993), pp.1–10. 42. Bowie, ‘Philostratus’, p.193. 43. See above, pp.64–6. 1

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therefore hugely variable; in a literary milieu such as this, readers would have highly developed instincts for assessing truth value and the priority of external referentiality. Authors would have complex and subtle ways of manipulating those instincts, which would have involved partially utilising multiple signi¿cation systems and generic frames. If we as modern readers want to understand fully the way these texts create meaning we need to be conversant with a wide array of texts of either mode, and importantly, of texts that exist on the generic borders between history and ¿ction, as Acts does. 2. Heliodorus and the Rhetoric of Realism. If it is dif¿cult to put Àesh on the bones of how authors in the ancient world engaged with the dialogue between ¿ction and history, it might be useful to look at how Heliodorus does so in the Aithiopika. In a fascinating study, John R. Morgan looks at how Heliodorus creates the illusion of historicity for his readers through a combination of techniques and devices from Hellenistic historiography.44 Heliodorus feigns, for example, authorial uncertainty on a number of occasions, throwing in phrases such as ‘I think’ (ÇčĸÀ)45 and ‘perhaps’ (ÌÚϸ).46 He hints that his sources may not be precise on certain details;47 he offers alternative explanations for events.48 All of these techniques are found in genuine histories and are markers suggestive of the historical mode – they each imply that the author is not omniscient, but dependent on sources of some sort. Offering a possible alternative suggests that the author does not know what happened – this is of course impossible in a world he created himself. Heliodorus also maintains a rhetoric of plausibility – that is, he sticks to ethnic stereotypes, known ‘facts’, geography and other details present in extant historiographical texts. According to Morgan, this ‘anchors his story in the real world’.49 Taken as a whole, these devices produce the illusion of realism that increases the narrative’s impact, making it seem more important and intense than an ‘unreal’ event could be.50

44. John R. Morgan, ‘History, Romance, and Realism in the Aithiopika of Heliodorus’, CA 1, no. 2 (1982), pp.221–65. 45. Morgan, ‘Realism in Heliodorus’, pp.227–8, citing such instances as 1.8.1; 2.22.1; 6.5.1; 10.6.5. 46. Morgan, ‘Realism in Heliodorus’, p.228, citing 2.20.2; 6.14.6; 7.5.2; 9.11.6; 9.19.2. 47. Morgan, ‘Realism in Heliodorus’, pp.228–9. 48. Morgan, ‘Realism in Heliodorus’, p.229. 49. Morgan, ‘Realism in Heliodorus’, p.234. 50. Morgan, ‘Realism in Heliodorus’, p.261. 1

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In relation to Acts, several important observations can be made. Acts makes a very limited use of these techniques. It certainly does make use of realistic details, but it is highly questionable that these could be said to amount to authorial uncertainty: they de¿nitely never stretch to raising the possibility of a competing explanation. Examples of this technique include 1.15, öŠ̼ ěÏÂÇË ĚÅÇÄÚÌÑÅ ëÈĖ Ìġ ¸ĤÌġ ĸʼĖ îÁ¸ÌġÅ ¼ċÁÇÊÀ, which offers only the faintest uncertainty and no possibility of an alternative version of events; several comments referring to the number of people saved (such as 2.41 and 4.4); the comment on 4.22, ëÌľÅ ºÛÉ öŠȼÀĠÅÑŠ̼ÊʼÉÚÁÇÅ̸ ĝ ÓÅ¿ÉÑÈÇË ëÎЏ ğÅ º¼ºĠżÀ Ìġ ʾļėÇÅ ÌÇıÌÇ ÌýË ĊÚʼÑË, offers neither uncertainty nor competing explanation; the same is true of 27.37, ôļ¿¸ »ò ¸Ď ÈÜʸÀ ÐÍϸĖ ëÅ ÌŊ ÈÂÇĕĿ »À¸ÁĠÊÀ¸À î¹»ÇÄûÁÇÅ̸ ïÆ, and 1.12, Ġ̼ ĨÈñÊÌɼиŠ¼ĊË `¼ÉÇÍʸÂüÄ ÒÈġ ěÉÇÍË ÌÇı Á¸ÂÇÍÄñÅÇÍ